WRITING A STATEMENT
Exploring
Reading the suggested reading material in the study guide under the Reading Point hearing. I try to use the words from Gilda Williams to guide me into this process: “Artists should have a wonderful time writing their artist’s statement. Writing it and reading it should be a joy and a pleasure. Artists are the world’s greatest expert on their art, and are free to write about their work however you wish. There are no rules. Artists! Who’s telling you to write in a way that you hate, to sound like somebody else? Nobody, except yourself. ”
I also looked at a basket weavers’ statement:
Mary Merkel Hess.
I looked at her work mainly to learn more about the methods of making with paper.
“I make baskets using a technique that I developed, a combination of three-dimensional collage and papier mache. The vessels are made over moulds. Small pieces of paper are applied with glue to the mould and allowed to dry, thus creating a paper form that is removed from its mould and further manipulated. Over the years, I have discovered many variations of this technique. I have used thin and thick papers, varied the shapes, and included paper cord, reed, or fiber in the body of the vessels. I have made interior forms for the baskets and then covered them with a “skin” of transparent paper. I make vessels because I am fascinated with form and structure. I look for inspiration in the natural world, and then allow technique to mesh with these visual ideas to create something new. I enjoy all aspects of this process: the appreciation of the world around me that suggests ideas and the search for a method of construction that allows my ideas to take shape.”
. This was screengrabbed from the IOWA women artist website at: http://www.lucidplanet.com/iwa/ArtistPages/merkelhessm.php
First Draft
Karen Stander resides on a farm in the Riebeek Valley in the Western Cape, South Africa. Here, she explores the connection between humans and non-humans by working with natural materials to make objects, drawings, and paintings, which asks questions about how we give voice to the non-human world by looking at the natural world. The artist is drawn to how care and relating (kinship) are part of making and thinking of the contemporary artist practice. Her work reminds us of a vital microcosm of human and non-human agents as she explores her work, which she calls ‘para’-sites, as different explorations of inter-connectedness. rework – repeating
For creating her body of work, the artist looked at theories of new materialism and eco-feminism, which critiques the dominant Western outlook on humanity, which has placed humans as independent of nature to justify the domination of a patriarchal system. She states that the theoretical work by Dona Haraway, a leading thinker on kinship and multispecies communities, encouraged her. (leave this and go to SYP) to visualise her body as a flow of organic and synthetic materials home to millions of microbes, bacteria and fungi.
In her body of work, the artist shares found objects collected from walks in nature by foraging and translating them into a series of drawings, documenting time-based work processes or knotting and weaving materials into nests. The artist enjoys working mostly with drawings and prints and making small objects. The artist wants her viewers to consider the natural process of decay and decomposition, strength and fragility, life and death, as she plays with boundaries between the experience of making with nature and a viewer’s reality and encouragement. – not didactic (which is mainly disconnected from the natural world)
notes during tutorial.
do, interest, process, theoretical leaning,it will encourage us to feel a connection with the non- human world