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.
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