Artist Statement Reflective Practice

Eleanor MacFarlane. Artist Statement.

This statement is in two parts. The first is for the moving image piece Construction in the form of a concrete poem. The second part is about my art practice. I would present this statement as accompanying material in an exhibition of the work, and so the audience is the exhibition viewer. 490 words

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Contraption Digital video still Eleanor MacFarlane 2013

Construction

Thoughts we build up create inner space

 And even if we know it’s all a construct

Constantly reformed, reimagined

A series of illusions

Layers of choices

As solid as stone

Is it fixed

Are we fixed

Can we alter how we are formed

Those hallmarks, fissures in our nature

Once in a while rupturing the edges, boundaries

Voices, memories echo, but something beautiful

Something inside of us chooses, chooses to be there

Something elusive: sparkling or signalling, shifting in and out

 Of harmony, in and out of dissonance, beauty and dysmorphia

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 art to explore psychological insights.

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 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 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 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.

20th September 2013