Graeme

 My work contains spatial anomalies to expose different perceptions, semiotic systems which are used to create a dialogue between the artist, the audience and the painting. The work uses the blank field as a domain, allowing empty spaces to interact in various ways with the spatial objects which themselves become a visible shape of misleading illusory distortion within the patterns.  The intention is to demonstrate the interplay between shapes, forms and shadows to achieve a 3- dimensional effect. Performing the activity within the action of practice requires interplay between decision making, choosing which spaces to leave empty and which to fill and the process of drawing.  This requires constant questioning as there is no fixed horizon or orientation.  The circular orientation creates a tool to facilitate specific perspectives which allow the image autonomy to spread according to the chiaroscuro, resulting in the illusion of impossible objects in unlikely places.      These illusory designs have a distinct habitual character in their make up or essence, as the fundamental notion of a puzzling pattern is consistent in the attempt to comprehend a type of uniform stability between the figure and ground interrelations. I experiment visually to connect planes and flat surfaces of empty voids which emphasise distortion and to expose illusive detailed shade.   Two contemporary practitioners’ artistic researches have had some bearing on my own. Firstly, my work has been influenced by that of Tomma Abts, her holding and unfolding space and use of light from different sources.  “There is a tense dialogue between the pictorial illusion of space in her paintings and the literal surface.” (Tom Morton, “Terminally New”, Frieze, No 97, March, 2006). In my work the illusive, emerging and disappearing boundaries and shapes which expose themselves are cut off and create margins which are the edges and borders separating the coloured areas from non-coloured spaces; some areas are left blank.  A graphical interface is created by the formation of a sharp division between two or several types of patterns. The patterns encourage a recurrent theme to develop as they structurally evolve.    Another influence has been Laura Owens whose work has, “Qualities that seem initially incompatible and in opposition with each other quickly achieve a rightness that oscillates somewhere between the eye and the mind” whilst also using “an informed, unpredictable and eclectic attitude towards creating a picture”. (D Rolph, Laura Owens, Camden Arts Centre, London, 2006).   “Her paintings are other worlds that operate out of time and context” in which, she creates distinctive and layered surfaces, oscillating between representation and abstraction.” (Ibid). Owens’ work uses motifs of an atmospheric landscape as does my own, but while she uses and positions her representational figures, the physical practice of my work consists of the placement of marks to create a system of semiotics, as Dexter (2005) might say, “perceptually present but conceptually absent”.      The shading in light and dark takes a main aspect of a chiaroscuro impression which is used along with the empty spaces, shapes and forms. The structural motifs are the recurring shapes I draw which have the distinctive appearance of a chain of rhyming forms.  There is an undecided element in using the perspective leading me to concentrate on how I can develop and use it as an instrument to invent new patterning.    The various pronounced subtleties I produce are used to expose and express different inclinations, both perceptually within the human mind and in relation to the image, as Laura Owens did in her work; pictorial questions are used as a type of dialogue and instrument to evolve the details’ expression as they develop through practice. My working method includes adding a series of layers as I decidedly alter the pictorial constructions in exploring exposed formations the oil paint can inhabit.   Laura Owens uses paint as its own medium; it is a territory of a subject matter I use to draw and paint and is also the established “ideology” in relation to which I am using the different visual themes of photography and video together with painting and drawing. The paintings and drawings here have a closer similarity within their imagery and manner to the built constructed forms, whereas the video in its subject matter could be its own self-contained, separate reality to that of a different visual perception from the non-mechanical practices.     Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photography of architecture, structural buildings as monumental symbols, has given me insight into the forms of buildings and encouraged me to go out and photograph structures. They had a concern with extracting subject matter from its surroundings, comparing shapes and forms.  I have chosen to use unusual angles, thereby gaining a different perception which raised my awareness of the detail within the structures.  I have incorporated some of these characteristics in my work to mimic and expand a field, using my impressions of the buildings themselves in conjunction with their transformation in the images. Andre, Carl. “A note on Bernd and Hilla Becher” Artforum (New York) 11, no. 4 (December 1972), pp.59-61.    The photographs’ details have been transformed and transferred to reconstruct images of reshaped and altered patterns; they depict unconventional structures. This experience of photography has encouraged me to branch out further into video installation work as this would allow yet further possibilities regarding the deliberate distortion of patterns.  For the video, there is no cultural or historical reference, as the subject matter consists of the geological strata, using distorted light to reflect how the emitted light can be altered and deciphered by the audience. In this work, I am creating a visual parallel of how light can join with its present space by projecting it onto uneven shaped plinths or objects.