ABSTRACT SAMPLING
This work was made during a Masters Of Fine Arts at Whitecliffes College of Art and Design completed 2005. I present three types of painting, two-dimensional, three-dimensional and scatter paintings which are multi-part configurations. I consider the white wall of the gallery or studio not to be a surface but to be a space. This allows the painted object to appear three-dimensional through illusionism. My surfaces are both material and metaphorical. These are juxtaposed, and the contrasts involve sheen, lustre, opacity/transparency, thickness/thinness, viscosity, depth and body. The paint is both skin and flesh or a metaphor for industry and city and a reflection of art history, so it is both personal and social.
Sampling is ‘recontextualising a visual or aural element from its original source into a new situation that enhances its particular quality while recreating a new network of meaning’ (Wallis, 2001, p 1). In my work I sample, reconfigure and layer information. I source and reinterpret art historical painting techniques which can collapse into one another and reside alongside low culture and other cultural information such as commercial graphics, quilts, mosaics, textiles, urban and aerial photographs and internet images. By including everyday references from the city and the domestic I create a collagist aesthetic. My photos of mirror glass buildings and quotations of early New Zealand quilts sit alongside abstract passages which allude to worn city surfaces. The use of fabric, wire, pipe cleaner and other materials adds feminine craft to the layering. The shaped fragments reflect the fleeting glance, the quick glimpse of the city flaneur and the rapid change and multiple collisions of experience evidenced in the social collage of the city.
Wallis, Simon (2001) Hybrids: International Contemporary Painting. Liverpool; Tate Publishing.
