Inside Me on display at the Public Archives in Halifax

As part of the Nova Scotia Printmakers Association's 5th Annual Exhibition I spent last Friday and Saturday installing "Inside Me" my printed fabric installation over the span of about 15 hours. The exhibition is held at the Nova Scotia Public Archives  in Halifax and includes over a 100 prints created by Nova Scotia's contemporary printmakers. 

Each time I have installed "Inside Me" it has been an entirely different experience and the results have been new and exciting. This time the installation has grown over the span of two giant swinging wall-doors. So in order to enter or exit the exhibition space the viewer has to pass through the art work.

 This was all of Fridays progress.

 The finished piece. 

 Swinging doors. 

This is the Artist statement for the Inside Me Installation:

{Inside Me

Making the surface transparent; breaking down the borders where the inside begins and the outside ends; pulling the inside out; letting the inside become the surface that inhabits the environment; these are considerations, processes and techniques by which I am trying to understand the entity that is me.

While gestures, expressions, rashes, hives and illness are common manifestations of the body’s complexity on the outside, I seek to imagine what happens beyond. Through my imagining, I come to myself. What if the internal patterns and textures are literally brought to the surface? What if they become part of the environment? Would I discover greater insight and understanding of my body and its intricacies? The interlace of systems, that I call “lacery”, delicately functions together and is so easily disrupted and turned against itself and its elements each to the other.  Each pattern I create is another layer that I extract from this lacery that is inspired by cellular and muscular structures, patterns of blood vessels, the nervous system, emotions, thoughts and feelings.

The “Inside Me” fabric installation brings the image of the body’s mystical interior to the public eye, it invades the public space. It asks the viewer to consider the consequences. What does it look like if our inside would become our living space. Would it be threatening?  Claustrophobic?  Spreading like a disease? Or would we feel liberated and see it growing like a beautiful plant? Would it be ornate and static or pulsing and alive?

“Inside Me” is constructed from fabric that is printed double sided with ballgrain plate lithography, a meticulous printmaking process that takes full body involvement.  Then each piece of fabric is sewn and stuffed into bulbous formations that get pinned together and stretched over shapes of chicken wire. Each time “Inside Me” is constructed it changes and adapts to the space and environment around it.