Sketch book drawing.

In this series of paintings and drawings of people in jars and bottles I am exploring my own boundaries of trust.
The people I have chosen to paint within the jars and bottles are those which range from distant connections, to my most intimate. The people in the drawings are made-up characters.
The jars represent an allocation of time, placing a person at a safe distance until I know them better. Giving myself time to consider, time to measure, time to feel and time to trust.

   

On a more public note these images refer to a society, which hides behind glass - behind screens, behind the face of Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites, neither here nor there. Trusting in untrustworthy governments, corporations and banking systems. As we look out our office windows and connect with the world through our work computers, travel home only to stare into our ipads, mobil phones and home laptops and TV's and occasionally out our windows to see a tree outside. We have become those ghosts driving this huge psychotic machine, which is disconnected from reality, relentless, unfeeling, untrustworthy and superficial. Having tremendous substance but at the same time no real substance at all. 

We have this illusion that we are safer behind our glass. Glass held up and precariously dangling from frigile strings, strings which stretch into the ether. Hoping we don't see ourselves for whom we really are and the predicament we have got ourselves in.

Now, I wonder what is on the horizon?

Nanette Cameron

Nanette Cameron was a work colleague of mine at Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts 

She owns the Nanette Cameron School of Interior Design

Acrylic on Canvas

The Mad Butcher

Peter (aka-The Mad Butcher) Leitch is known by all New Zealanders.

He own's a chain of Butcher shops throughout NZ

and is a great supporter for the Vodafone Warriors (The NZ Rugby League Team).

I met him through my husband.

Acrylic on canvas.

Makareta & Pairama

 Makareta and Piarama proud of their new Ta Moko (Tattoos)

Acrylic on Canvas

My Loves on the Line

A friend, and work colleague of mine. 

Acrylic on Canvas 

Dave & Eddie

Two people I know only through brief acquaintance.

I have met them but they do not know each other.

Dave (on the left) is an Electrician and worked on our house

and Eddie owned a liquor store we go to.

Acrylic on Canvas

Magazine girl in a jar

I decided to paint this image I found in a magazine of this girl and place her in a jar.

 She is unknown to me.  Acrylic on Canvas

Masked girl in a jar

I'll leave this one unexplained. Acrylic on Canvas.

A girl named Feelings

 

A girl named Feelings

Acrylic on Canvas

This wee painting is in the realm of neither here nor there, as she hangs from an unknown source, protected but oh so vulnerable inside the glass jar.

I'm not resolved

I made this work in response to a Ronnie van Hout work I saw a few years ago.

Being an artist and always creating artworks I consider my work is never fully resolved and because of this, it empowers me to explore even further. The reason why this work is 'neither here nor there' is because it still leaves a few questions begging to be answered - Is it resolved as it exists right now even though it admits its unresolved or is it simply unresolved as it states? Taking the fact that every second the molecules which make up the work are ever changing as it slowly decomposes over time, would suggest the work is right in saying it is forever unresolved. But any second one looks upon the work, could be taken as resolved?

There is the descision made by the individual viewers - one person could see it as a finished resolved artwork while another would not.

JacquesDerrida spoke about 'Trace' - Trace can be seen as an always contingent term for a "mark of the absence of a presence, an always-already absent present".

Martin Heidegger spoke about Rous rature: usually translated as 'under erasure', it involves the crossing out of a word within a text, but allowing it to remain legible and in place.

Sous rature has been described as the “typographical expression of deconstruction”

"The gesture of sous rature (putting under erasure) implies 'both this and that' as well as 'neither this nor that', undoing the opposition and the heirachy between the legible and the erased"

I feel this work sits within these realms.  



Stepping out of the way of myself

A wee sketch from my visual diary