DEGREE SHOW PREVIEW

String mare, degree show woes

I wanted to create a spatial drawing installation mimicking the affect of a closed- eye visual. My previous work has been involved with organic light forms, light rays, spots, shars, beams, delicate hints of after-image that we perceive.

My earlier work used pin-prick drawings, and string as a signifier of light and evocative of the intangible shapely forms of light. I wanted to draw with light, using the physical nature of light to propose image.

To develop my work, this semester I have used found and personal imagery, slices of portraits, hints at figuration to create these ethereal images, hazy traces of forms.

The notion of trace as art become of interest, as an experimentation of materials. I started to create hints of human trace, figurative forms with ethereal products. Creating pin - prick portraits, finger prints, spots of breath highlight this interest in a trace or aftermath of image. I also used to dust and grease to make figures, slides of memory that fade, disintegrate with time and motion.

String became my main material of choice. It is at once present and structural, and simultaneously flimsy, on the brink of collapse or 'snap'.
String started taking on a more symbolic role, the strands evoking the strands of time and memory.

Dust and grease drawings

The thin layer of dust...

Detail

This work is a haunting of space, a half remembered moment, or gesture, made almost real again. The screens are ghostly, ethereal things, false memories handed down through stories, which shape our lives as our secret inheritance, the ones received when, hand pressed to heart, an aging relative exclaims how like her sister you became just then. This work is that moment where those invisible lives overlap with our own. Our personal palimpsests.

Working in darkness, the screens possess a fleetingness, a fragility, their images surrendered but not, intimate but not, personal, but universally familiar. The artist works in light, every thread meticulously drawn and painted into a suspended moment of transition, intertwining with the viewers own perception and memories to create a new instance that lingers with them long after their departure.