CellarDoor: January 2014

Tuesday 21 January 2014

Artist Statement - January assessment

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi…

… Meaning, ‘Thus passes the glory of the world’. All worldly things are fleeting and everything is transient. Much time is spent reflecting and obsessing on the transience of mortal existence. This leads to a certain level of vanity as we try desperately to remember and be remembered. The Latin for this is ‘vanitas’; loosely translated this corresponds to the meaningless of earthly life and the transient nature of all earthly goods and pursuits.

It is a struggle to accept that all the beauty of nature and art, of the world around us and of our sensations, will really fade away into nothing. We long to believe that somehow this evanescent beauty must be able to persist and to escape all the powers of destruction. We remind ourselves of ‘Memento Mori’, symbolic for the inevitability of death. It is this dread we experience, an insecurity when we imagine our inescapable end. We covet for a preservation and protection of our image, name and memory. It is part of our human nature to long to be remembered, or at least not forgotten. Christian Boltanski said,

‘The human being dies two deaths, the physical death and then the immaterial death, when the very last image and memory of the individual fade.’

We have a desire for immortality; this can be achieved through the longevity of our image and memory. My research and studio practice have aided me in my exploration of the fleeting nature of human experience. My work dwells on the nature of human identity by investigating its relationship with portraiture. The two running themes in my work are; the impermanence and transience of our existence. Like leaves on a tree, we are here for a season, we fade away with autumn but the tree remains. These works are displayed in the hallway outside the first year computer room. The transparency of the piece aims to generate feelings of transience, loss and fleetingness.

‘Alas, for the affairs of men, when they are fortunate

You might compare them to a shadow; and if they are unfortunate

A wet sponge with one dash, wipes the picture away

-Aeschylus

The other theme in my work centralizes on that vanity deep inside us. That desire that haunts us when we imagine death. For years photography and portraiture have assisted us in our desperate endeavors against forgetting and being forgotten. We find comfort in this also, when we lose a loved one for example. In Victorian times, Daguerreotypes were incredibly popular due to their accurate likeness and haunting depth. They were said to serve as an accurate portrait of the soul, a representation of a person’s essence. This photography seemed to include part of their physical being; when someone died, huge comfort was found in post-mortem photography. These images captured the life of the dead. ‘It is not merely the likeness alone which is precious in these cases, but the association and the sense of nearness involved in the thing. The fact of the very shadow of the lying there, fixed forever.

The work in my studio space explores the desperation that urges us to preserve a part of ourselves. In the precious cabinets, you will see my resin portraits, protected in a robust material, these are surrounded by an array of miscellaneous objects that are in themselves representations of people, ie. My grandmother’s school dictionary, hair, teeth, religious memorabilia and other heirlooms. These objects demonstrate examples of alternative portraits.