NOTES ON PLAY
I am interested in creating spaces where being and becoming are able to dance together for at least one instant; a medial place, for the play of movement and transformation. My installations act as playgrounds for the acting-out of play. A place where “living paintings/objects” are left to their own devices and are invited to perform with and for the viewer. The gallery space functions as the frame and the container for the potential of such a performance, and the objects found within are what create the visual tensions that insinuate the movement for a game of play to be enacted. I am more concerned with the ambiguities of the act of play, than I am with the rules of the game. A game is played, it is not play.
Play is non-materialistic it is an acting out, a movement, a state of mind, and a performance in the making. It is equally as physical as it is mental. The act of play takes place within its own temporality and reality, one that exists outside the ordinary rules of daily life and that is often demarcated by a boundary or a sacred spot; either, materially, abstractly and ideologically. One always walks in and out of play and most importantly one is always transformed by play.
Play inscribes itself onto the body by way of sensation and brings to the surface new resolutions. Moving by way of rhythm, play is transitive, creative, and transformative.
Play is also ritualistic. Performed within the sacred and often serious, these performative acts function within a symbolic order that often comes into being through the acting-out of a rite, a myth, a song and through the somantic relationships found between words and signs that are put into flight. These symbolic gestures are able to put into motion new belief systems that are able to stretch beyond the ordinary and into the sacred imaginary. Play, here, functions as an act of meditation for the body and for the spirit whose motion can bring one beyond a logical understanding of reality and into an intangibly unknown higher order. These spaces are often liminal, mystical, holy and mysterious.
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THE BODY
-To begin with the human body – to cover it, to conceal it and to contain it, so as to expose it, reveal it and set it free.-
My work begins with the body as a template, an idea and a form of gesture. My drawings derive from a multi-layered process of manipulation and disfigurement. Situated between figuration and abstraction they investigate and question the representation and the potentialities of the shape and form of the human body. I am interested in the outcomes that materialize once the conventional form of the body is collapsed and concealed. I create my own manipulations by deconstructing and fragmenting the familiar within its structure. I cut and rearrange the shapes in order to define its physical limits, and I manipulate and conceal its surface in order to define its space. I am interested in the idea of the body as a fragmented, unstable and fluctuant form. One that is defined as human before gendered, and delineated by boundaries that have the potential to be exposed, imposed upon, and potentially broken.