Artist Statement update

It was timely to review my artist statement for curator Lucy Day. Although this is a little long, it serves as my new mastercopy for editing bits. I used parts of my older statement and found writings from the MA which I wanted to incorporate.

About a year ago I looked at my statement and it still pretty much said what I wanted, but now I have more thinking and writing process to add, more explicit ideas and references outside my own work.

I aim to work on condensing this version for the assessment to 500 words. There are more concepts to add and define, but it gets nearer to saying what I want to say about my work.

Eleanor MacFarlane. Artist Statement. July 2013

I explore the paradox in art, the areas where ideas, science, literature and philosophy overlap. I never came across a scientific theory or astronomical fact that I couldn't relate directly to my own thinking, or to the human experience. It is as if the Universe is a model of the internal experience, subject to laws and forces, and the arts and culture are our maps of discovery. I use analogies of light, electricity, the flow of water, tendencies and resistances, magnetism and shading in my work by creating forms for those ideas.

I make moving image - multi-layered photographs which exist in time rather than on paper. Overlaid video and animation are visual poems to explore inner concepts. I also make objects, or art contraptions - sculptural installations as a quest towards solid moving image – low-tech art inventions with destabilised imagery.

There are images I tend towards – the offcut shape, the brick wall, traces of people and the suggestion of presence, through shadows, reflections and abstracted forms. I've always found shadows particularly revealing and eloquent, as if they are a manifestation of a side of the person, a gesture or unconscious leak. I am looking for the merest layer or glimpse of presence. This minimalism leads me to images which are recognisable as individuals, yet generic and anonymous. A distorted image of the face or body can infer ideas of dysmorphia, or the inner, psychological reality of feeling.

My art practice is resourceful, and I reframe old and new items within my work, using the trails of provenance which vintage or industrial findings bring. I break down and isolate elements, and then build them into a new structure like Minimalist music. I bring my background in classical music into my art practice, composing sound for the moving image in this way, abstracting and layering meaningful modulations and harmonies with recorded sounds.

I offer the viewer a multiplicity of interpretations and meanings. I draw the viewer into an ambiguous experience, perhaps of time flowing differently, or an oblique or abstract view. I show the hidden movement behind solid things, as a reminder to my own thinking that nothing is really static, and even the most solidified thought or belief is subject to change. The most influential idea that informs my work is that thinking itself creates electro- chemical pathways in the brain, and that every thought creates new pathways or reinforces old ones.
I make moving image frame by frame, drawing by drawing, allowing, including or excluding each element, to make it all my view and choice. I want to make it mine, to relate to it, and it becomes my reflexive lens which defines for me how I see, and offer that paradigm to the viewer.

I am fascinated with the process of creativity itself, the nature of vision and reality, and how the mind apprehends and interprets visual constructs. I cannot read the book, “The Object stares Back” by James Elkins often enough, for its central philosophy which I share, that vision is both a shared and individual series of illusions: “Seeing alters the thing that is seen and transforms the seer.” I admire the Surrealist photographers for their abstract views and psychological realities revealed by the camera; Film Noir for the use of shadows and lighting to suggest character and menace; and contemporary artists Susan Derges and Cornelia Parker who use ideas in science and optics in creating individual aesthetic forms.

I think of making art as a complex abstract painting, which, as soon as marks are made, has layers of equations to resolve. There are many processes and thoughts to find the finished work, and there may be myriad solutions, but there is one right one, one manifestation of all the elements which brings art all together, and creates a frame for my own view and understanding of how the world works.

16th July 2013