The desires I have for my art and process are most poetically and concisely expressed by Mary Frank when she says, “I love the gesture of work, watching someone do work they do well or with experience, with certain essential gestures, nothing wasted.” There is nothing like watching the perfect marks seem to flow out onto the page. The notes pouring right out of the musician’s fingers. As though there is nothing between the brain and the piano. No time. The music is just there. You don’t even know how the artwork came about, but it looks good and feels right.
Because charcoal can be picked up just as easily as it’s put down, it seems as though I am only conscious enough of where the work is going to drag the charcoal along the page, stop, look, and go back to it perhaps a little faster and choppier. It’s as though I’m in a thick fog. Charcoal can be pushed around, built up, left packed up in a line, smoothed out into a soft gradation…no mark is permanent. Even after it is “sealed” half of it can be blown off of the page. This can be frustrating, but the material allows for an incredible amount of flexibility.
I have the freedom to work from other artist’s compositions, putting the darks down on the paper and carefully preserving the lights, but can then suddenly decide to diverge from that artist’s work and begin imposing my own visions onto the page. I have the freedom to respond to the many chords, lyrics, and sound effects of music. I have the freedom to build up the blackest black on the page, and then decide that I would like for something to emerge from that blackness. Through careful manipulation, I get to see objects and textures begin to surface from nothing. I can make images which are completely unnatural but still seem tangible. I can test the limits of objects, stretching them until they are almost illegible. To put this all simply, I have the freedom to respond. The freedom to change direction when I find that I am losing interest in the work. My work thus becomes a concrete, hybrid form of my thoughts, my gestures, and my physical and metal responses to music, photographs, objects, people, my previous artworks, and the artworks of others.
“So what does it mean?” everyone asks of art. “Why did you do this?” “Who is that?” In order to “understand” the artwork I make it is essential to approach it free of the expectation that we will ever understand it, but full of the enthusiasm and curiosity which make us try. Of course the work means something to me, but it means something a little different to me every day. I refuse to do the work the injustice of having labels assigned to its otherwise rather mystifying details. My work is about the work. It is about my experience of making it and how—if at all—it makes its mark on the viewer. It’s about me putting something out onto the paper and the viewer taking something away. My passion becoming someone else’s inspiration. A visual jam session. It’s about energy. It’s about association. It’s about texture and feeling. And if a viewer is particularly engaged, it is also about experiencing variations in states of awareness.
One might argue that working so representationally detracts from my goal of creating something so abstract as visual music or visual states of mind. Sure, I draw objects and figures. I give my works titles. But that’s only because, for me, there is nothing less enticing and satisfying than a work without a title or devoid of those oh-so-tantalizing images to which we can assign meaning. Recognizable objects serve as visual cues that can be held on to in these worlds of transitioning line and space. Read into the imagery. Respond to the marks. Look for patterns and relationships. …Or don’t. The work is about experiencing flights of the individual mind. You’re on your own. Enjoy it.
In Zen Buddhism, teachers emphasize the importance of staying present as a means to enlightenment. They say if we are to find any peace, any harmony, any lasting happiness, and any end to suffering, it is by living in the present moment. If we can be where we are when we are there, then nothing is lacking, nothing is wrong. In our presentness, everything is as it should be.
And yet, how is everything?
Few of us ever notice what it is to walk, what it is to see, what it is to breathe because these are automatic, and supposedly mundane experiences. We are too concerned with where we are going, or what we are looking for, and the actual walking and looking fall to the background. And breathing? It just happens, and we live because of that breath, that air, relying on it happening without effort.
(but how wondrous is a single breath when you feel it. and each one is always different, though the same—rising//falling//pausing. but you have to feel it.)
To be here, in the present, is actually far from mundane; it is full of sensations, feelings, and thoughts. We are taking in from the world around us—grounding ourselves in our surroundings—and at the same time we are contributing to them, adding our breath, our thoughts, our emotions—floating through each moment. The present is mysterious and engaging because to be present is to simultaneously know and not know. It is to be at once floating and grounded. It is to be in-between, both awakened and at wonder. --
To paint is to breathe. Or at least it is the same sort of experience. It is a taking in and a letting out. I see light and color, delight in them. My surroundings permeate me; I dissolve into them. I reflect back out what I have taken in; I translate and transform it. The paint holds the shifting light and color still, and it holds me still, but only so much. There is a continual shifting, an accumulating and evaporating of sensation. When things shift enough, they blur together.
I am hardly the only person interested in dissolving into my experience. Agnes Martin’s work is “wordless and silent” because it is, because when she lets herself dissolve into her experience, there is only this, this, this. There is no room for anything else. Similarly, Uta Barth’s blurred photographs link physical reality with mental reality; there is no separating out the body from the mind or from our surroundings. Martin, Barth and I, all of us want the in-between. We want to be grounded in our surroundings, our experiences, but we also want to float—just enough—to be here.
The first time I saw one of Richard Avedon’s portraits I was struck by how much I could see. Time slowed down. I noticed the way freckles scattered carelessly across skin; I noticed the slight raise of an eyebrow, a bitten lip, a rusted button. I noticed and I was in awe of how much information I felt there was about the subject in the photograph, how well I felt like I knew them, and how deeply resonating and long lasting their gaze was, all captured in the stillness of a photograph, the same stillness that forces us to look, and to notice things we often miss in the natural motion of our lives. I strive to create portraits that arouse this kind of reaction in the viewer.
I am driving on Route 7 in Baltimore, tempted to close my eyes as the innumerable lights and repetitive glaring reflections in the CarMax parking lot hurt my eyes. It is now that I realize how backwards things have become. I should want to open my eyes to see, to drink in, and to savor the abundance of naturally occurring stimulation with which the world provides us.
In his book Outside Lies Magic John Stilgoe explains the phenomenon of the diminishing importance placed on visual acuity. It is this lost skill that I aim to at least create a desire to resurrect. I want viewers to enjoy and crave the exercise of eye and mind that comes with true looking and seeing.
I am a photographer because I am able to capture moments or frames that highlight unique beauty in the people and environments that surround us. I aim to create works that use composition to highlight certain features that make people or objects unique such as textures, flaws, personality traits, physical habits, visible signs of age. I think that if we purposefully notice these things more often our lives will become richer and more fulfilling without the need to consume more. In the disposable world we’ve created I am interested in savoring details and moments.
I am interested in how the delicate features of humanity can be simply isolated through the stillness of photographs to show their innate complexity and their enriching power in our lives. I see portraiture as a way to re-conceptualize the way we look at and think of the body, the face, personality, and identity and how these aspects of humanity relate to one another.
The sculptor Tony Feher said that “I think people are looking all the time, but I don’t think they’re seeing anything.” I want to create work that asks people to not only look, but to see. The photographs I produce are an invitation to others to see, to savor the moments and details that I have, and then in turn begin to savor their own.
We are a soft species. Are skin is thin and tender. We feel it all, the wind and rain and sun and soil. We are, by physical standards, maladapted for our environment. But there is a reason why we are still here. It is our creativity. This creativity allows us to change our fate momentarily. It is a drive that compels us to react to the environment as if our lives depended on it. Our lives do depend on it. Our innovative actions are no less vital that our reproductive abilities. They are mindless imperatives; they are our purpose, they the single most satisfying endeavors any human being may engage. But this creativity, the creativity that unites us as human beings, is not the creativity that we know today. We are going numb. We do not need anything anymore. We are secure. We do not feel the wind and the rain and the sun and the soil as a constant reminder of our source. Conventional learning and focused attention have replaced inventive reaction and fascination. We are senseless. Those who have not gone numb are social outliers, a fringe world of artists who sell their attempts to remember a humane creativity back to the populous of virgin creators. Creativity is now founded on an expendable surplus, a labor division given to the introverted individuals who seek novelty and differentiation. Our artwork is only as valuable as our audience’s own ignorance. As artists we have stolen creativity, or rather a weak misinterpretation of a creativity that is all we have left. This cannot continue. What we need are the archaic artists. The archaic artists will need to go home, to renounce their domestication and go feral. The archaic artists will revive human creativity. They will bring down the walls of our classrooms and galleries and let the light shine in, for the sterility of the institution offers no connection between humanity and what we need. The fad of individualism and independence will be exposed for its weakness; no one can bring down their own institution and rebuild a home by themselves. This is a reformation in education and the economy of creativity. It is not counterculture or progressive. This is simply a chance to stop and build a fire around which to speak openly about what we need next. This is a chance to remember what makes us human.
A place becomes familiar – a backyard can become boring, overworked, overplayed, flat – the space does not spark the stream of consciousness it had in the past. But there are areas that can be revived. Scanning the yard, I find a dogwood tree. I can cut a flower from its roots, and put it into my grandmother’s vase. Reflections appear; surfaces meet for the first time, layers act upon each other. Memories come rushing to the surface, new ideas are presented, and habit or intuition keeps these ripples alive.
Two trees form an arched doorway to the river.
A brick wall cuts off the glowing orange pile of leaves.
The wing of the plane meets the pools of water below.
The edges of geometric surfaces against the fluid and irregular forms are curious. The border, the frame, the edge, is just as important as the space that is enclosed. Without separation, there would not be a connection.
Our visions are affected with a conglomeration of media. I want to capture this assortment of technological and experiential moments. A constructed space made up of a combination of surfaces and material can extend beyond the original boundaries of a place. Numerous threads of contrasts and comparisons keep associations active.
If arranged effectively, I am able to see myself seeing. There are traces of familiarity in the piece, but the place has been once or twice removed. Relationships have been altered and view of an original place has changed – an old pond, your backyard can become as captivating as an exotic destination.
Panoramas of cut and pasted material create a puzzle - a wide view with several disconnected spaces. It is not like jigsaw puzzles – there is not a set solution, you do not get what was expected from the start. The pieces do not fit neatly together.
“ If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without the cloud, there will be no rain, without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without the trees, we cannot make paper…. So we can say that the cloud and the paper ‘inter-are’. We cannot just be by ourselves alone; we have to ‘inter-be’ with every other thing. We are in fact empty of a separate self, but empty of a separate self, means full of everything.” - Thich Nhat Hanh, from The Heart of Understanding
When I was a young girl, the search for my own identity was an impossible task to complete. Unable to define myself, I depended on my culture and the people that surrounded me to provide me an identity. Now that I am an adult, I discovered how I am constantly using this past experience of finding oneself to find who I am today. Through art making, I narrate my emotions and how different experiences have hindered my formation of self-identity. It is this struggle of finding myself-identity that is the subject of my artworks.
My art is meant to begin a conversation, the exchange of words between people that happens without the word of mouth. It is a way of expressing and documenting my emotions. It is my dairy to the world. They tell the stories about my fears, desires, transformations and my being. Every composition deals with a part of my existence and each element in the work is a section of my life.
When I start my mark making, I start from an ending of a past experience. I do not and cannot draw my experiences, but rather as I feel them. I step back from my role of an author and instead take a place of seeker. I no longer state to observe the human figure, but rather I become the figure. The ending for me now becomes unseen and outside of my control. I am no more determining what to tell about the story, how to tell it and the way my viewers should see it. My body of work then becomes an extension of myself and my mark makings become records of my movements within time and space.
When drawing I use layers, lines, shapes, textures, and distortion to create ambiguous space. I want the viewer to move through the piece by following the lines, which vary from light to dark, thin to thick, straight to curvy. Though not totally volumetric, the layered composition helps to lead the viewer's eye into an illusionist space, manipulating their certainty of what it is they are seeing. One cannot fully figure out what the drawings contain. Yet when one looks closer, one begins to see all the details. It is only then that the images reveal themselves.
In my work, the use of symbolic and expressionistic depiction, rather than direct representation of myself, conveys the intense emotions that I am portraying in the artwork. The symbolism that I use in my work is not straightforward and varies in functions. It is the combination of whites of white and blacks of black; it is the negative and positive space created in my works. They sometimes appear to be a portal pulling my viewers in and they sometimes act as a barrier, stopping the viewers from knowing anything beyond that point. I believe that true expression is attainable through colorless means, because I believe that color forces the viewer’s eyes to notice its characteristics and influence the way they relate to the work projected. Black and white also has the tendency to link between the past and the present and illustrate a present emotion of nostalgia. Handwriting is also another symbolic instrument I depict in my artworks. It is another way of tracing my identity; it is a mark of my individuality. Though I write in different languages, when the written phrases come together they become one larger form and still retain that individuality of the writer.
The purpose of my works is to show, how my struggle, to find self-identity affects me both emotionally and mentally without direct depiction. Through the use of visual metaphor, I illustrated an autobiography, showing the struggle and the continuous battle of finding oneself between the identities created and or provided by society and culture.
My work begins a conversation with my audience. They question the viewer about who they are and leave them with a choice of being content or disturbed. Some of my audience might look at my work and feel like they know and have found their identity and some of them might look at my work and feel lost. My work is not about who is right or wrong, it is about my belief of finding oneself and how I have looked at other people for example and comparison in an attempt to find my ideal self. In these works, I search for that something called an Identity and I still search for that being called 'me’.
Artist Statement
ReplyDeleteSarah Kramer
The desires I have for my art and process are most poetically and concisely expressed by Mary Frank when she says, “I love the gesture of work, watching someone do work they do well or with experience, with certain essential gestures, nothing wasted.” There is nothing like watching the perfect marks seem to flow out onto the page. The notes pouring right out of the musician’s fingers. As though there is nothing between the brain and the piano. No time. The music is just there. You don’t even know how the artwork came about, but it looks good and feels right.
Because charcoal can be picked up just as easily as it’s put down, it seems as though I am only conscious enough of where the work is going to drag the charcoal along the page, stop, look, and go back to it perhaps a little faster and choppier. It’s as though I’m in a thick fog. Charcoal can be pushed around, built up, left packed up in a line, smoothed out into a soft gradation…no mark is permanent. Even after it is “sealed” half of it can be blown off of the page. This can be frustrating, but the material allows for an incredible amount of flexibility.
I have the freedom to work from other artist’s compositions, putting the darks down on the paper and carefully preserving the lights, but can then suddenly decide to diverge from that artist’s work and begin imposing my own visions onto the page. I have the freedom to respond to the many chords, lyrics, and sound effects of music. I have the freedom to build up the blackest black on the page, and then decide that I would like for something to emerge from that blackness. Through careful manipulation, I get to see objects and textures begin to surface from nothing. I can make images which are completely unnatural but still seem tangible. I can test the limits of objects, stretching them until they are almost illegible. To put this all simply, I have the freedom to respond. The freedom to change direction when I find that I am losing interest in the work. My work thus becomes a concrete, hybrid form of my thoughts, my gestures, and my physical and metal responses to music, photographs, objects, people, my previous artworks, and the artworks of others.
“So what does it mean?” everyone asks of art. “Why did you do this?” “Who is that?” In order to “understand” the artwork I make it is essential to approach it free of the expectation that we will ever understand it, but full of the enthusiasm and curiosity which make us try. Of course the work means something to me, but it means something a little different to me every day. I refuse to do the work the injustice of having labels assigned to its otherwise rather mystifying details. My work is about the work. It is about my experience of making it and how—if at all—it makes its mark on the viewer. It’s about me putting something out onto the paper and the viewer taking something away. My passion becoming someone else’s inspiration. A visual jam session. It’s about energy. It’s about association. It’s about texture and feeling. And if a viewer is particularly engaged, it is also about experiencing variations in states of awareness.
One might argue that working so representationally detracts from my goal of creating something so abstract as visual music or visual states of mind. Sure, I draw objects and figures. I give my works titles. But that’s only because, for me, there is nothing less enticing and satisfying than a work without a title or devoid of those oh-so-tantalizing images to which we can assign meaning. Recognizable objects serve as visual cues that can be held on to in these worlds of transitioning line and space. Read into the imagery. Respond to the marks. Look for patterns and relationships. …Or don’t. The work is about experiencing flights of the individual mind. You’re on your own. Enjoy it.
In Zen Buddhism, teachers emphasize the importance of staying present as a means to enlightenment. They say if we are to find any peace, any harmony, any lasting happiness, and any end to suffering, it is by living in the present moment. If we can be where we are when we are there, then nothing is lacking, nothing is wrong. In our presentness, everything is as it should be.
ReplyDeleteAnd yet, how is everything?
Few of us ever notice what it is to walk, what it is to see, what it is to breathe because these are automatic, and supposedly mundane experiences. We are too concerned with where we are going, or what we are looking for, and the actual walking and looking fall to the background. And breathing? It just happens, and we live because of that breath, that air, relying on it happening without effort.
(but how wondrous is a single breath when you feel it. and each one is always different, though the same—rising//falling//pausing. but you have to feel it.)
To be here, in the present, is actually far from mundane; it is full of sensations, feelings, and thoughts. We are taking in from the world around us—grounding ourselves in our surroundings—and at the same time we are contributing to them, adding our breath, our thoughts, our emotions—floating through each moment. The present is mysterious and engaging because to be present is to simultaneously know and not know. It is to be at once floating and grounded. It is to be in-between, both awakened and at wonder.
--
To paint is to breathe. Or at least it is the same sort of experience. It is a taking in and a letting out. I see light and color, delight in them. My surroundings permeate me; I dissolve into them. I reflect back out what I have taken in; I translate and transform it. The paint holds the shifting light and color still, and it holds me still, but only so much. There is a continual shifting, an accumulating and evaporating of sensation. When things shift enough, they blur together.
I am hardly the only person interested in dissolving into my experience. Agnes Martin’s work is “wordless and silent” because it is, because when she lets herself dissolve into her experience, there is only this, this, this. There is no room for anything else. Similarly, Uta Barth’s blurred photographs link physical reality with mental reality; there is no separating out the body from the mind or from our surroundings. Martin, Barth and I, all of us want the in-between. We want to be grounded in our surroundings, our experiences, but we also want to float—just enough—to be here.
The first time I saw one of Richard Avedon’s portraits I was struck by how much I could see. Time slowed down. I noticed the way freckles scattered carelessly across skin; I noticed the slight raise of an eyebrow, a bitten lip, a rusted button. I noticed and I was in awe of how much information I felt there was about the subject in the photograph, how well I felt like I knew them, and how deeply resonating and long lasting their gaze was, all captured in the stillness of a photograph, the same stillness that forces us to look, and to notice things we often miss in the natural motion of our lives. I strive to create portraits that arouse this kind of reaction in the viewer.
ReplyDeleteI am driving on Route 7 in Baltimore, tempted to close my eyes as the innumerable lights and repetitive glaring reflections in the CarMax parking lot hurt my eyes. It is now that I realize how backwards things have become. I should want to open my eyes to see, to drink in, and to savor the abundance of naturally occurring stimulation with which the world provides us.
In his book Outside Lies Magic John Stilgoe explains the phenomenon of the diminishing importance placed on visual acuity. It is this lost skill that I aim to at least create a desire to resurrect. I want viewers to enjoy and crave the exercise of eye and mind that comes with true looking and seeing.
I am a photographer because I am able to capture moments or frames that highlight unique beauty in the people and environments that surround us. I aim to create works that use composition to highlight certain features that make people or objects unique such as textures, flaws, personality traits, physical habits, visible signs of age. I think that if we purposefully notice these things more often our lives will become richer and more fulfilling without the need to consume more. In the disposable world we’ve created I am interested in savoring details and moments.
I am interested in how the delicate features of humanity can be simply isolated through the stillness of photographs to show their innate complexity and their enriching power in our lives. I see portraiture as a way to re-conceptualize the way we look at and think of the body, the face, personality, and identity and how these aspects of humanity relate to one another.
The sculptor Tony Feher said that “I think people are looking all the time, but I don’t think they’re seeing anything.” I want to create work that asks people to not only look, but to see. The photographs I produce are an invitation to others to see, to savor the moments and details that I have, and then in turn begin to savor their own.
We are a soft species. Are skin is thin and tender. We feel it all, the wind and rain and sun and soil. We are, by physical standards, maladapted for our environment. But there is a reason why we are still here. It is our creativity.
ReplyDeleteThis creativity allows us to change our fate momentarily. It is a drive that compels us to react to the environment as if our lives depended on it. Our lives do depend on it. Our innovative actions are no less vital that our reproductive abilities. They are mindless imperatives; they are our purpose, they the single most satisfying endeavors any human being may engage. But this creativity, the creativity that unites us as human beings, is not the creativity that we know today. We are going numb.
We do not need anything anymore. We are secure. We do not feel the wind and the rain and the sun and the soil as a constant reminder of our source. Conventional learning and focused attention have replaced inventive reaction and fascination. We are senseless.
Those who have not gone numb are social outliers, a fringe world of artists who sell their attempts to remember a humane creativity back to the populous of virgin creators. Creativity is now founded on an expendable surplus, a labor division given to the introverted individuals who seek novelty and differentiation. Our artwork is only as valuable as our audience’s own ignorance. As artists we have stolen creativity, or rather a weak misinterpretation of a creativity that is all we have left.
This cannot continue.
What we need are the archaic artists.
The archaic artists will need to go home, to renounce their domestication and go feral. The archaic artists will revive human creativity. They will bring down the walls of our classrooms and galleries and let the light shine in, for the sterility of the institution offers no connection between humanity and what we need. The fad of individualism and independence will be exposed for its weakness; no one can bring down their own institution and rebuild a home by themselves.
This is a reformation in education and the economy of creativity. It is not counterculture or progressive. This is simply a chance to stop and build a fire around which to speak openly about what we need next. This is a chance to remember what makes us human.
Emily Norris
ReplyDeleteArtist Statement
A place becomes familiar – a backyard can become boring, overworked, overplayed, flat – the space does not spark the stream of consciousness it had in the past. But there are areas that can be revived. Scanning the yard, I find a dogwood tree. I can cut a flower from its roots, and put it into my grandmother’s vase. Reflections appear; surfaces meet for the first time, layers act upon each other. Memories come rushing to the surface, new ideas are presented, and habit or intuition keeps these ripples alive.
Two trees form an arched doorway to the river.
A brick wall cuts off the glowing orange pile of leaves.
The wing of the plane meets the pools of water below.
The edges of geometric surfaces against the fluid and irregular forms are curious. The border, the frame, the edge, is just as important as the space that is enclosed. Without separation, there would not be a connection.
Our visions are affected with a conglomeration of media. I want to capture this assortment of technological and experiential moments. A constructed space made up of a combination of surfaces and material can extend beyond the original boundaries of a place. Numerous threads of contrasts and comparisons keep associations active.
If arranged effectively, I am able to see myself seeing. There are traces of familiarity in the piece, but the place has been once or twice removed. Relationships have been altered and view of an original place has changed – an old pond, your backyard can become as captivating as an exotic destination.
Panoramas of cut and pasted material create a puzzle - a wide view with several disconnected spaces. It is not like jigsaw puzzles – there is not a set solution, you do not get what was expected from the start. The pieces do not fit neatly together.
also see more related writings on my blog.
ReplyDeletehttp://howtobuildapoint.blogspot.com
“ If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without the cloud, there will be no rain, without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without the trees, we cannot make paper…. So we can say that the cloud and the paper ‘inter-are’. We cannot just be by ourselves alone; we have to ‘inter-be’ with every other thing. We are in fact empty of a separate self, but empty of a separate self, means full of everything.”
ReplyDelete- Thich Nhat Hanh, from The Heart of Understanding
When I was a young girl, the search for my own identity was an impossible task to complete. Unable to define myself, I depended on my culture and the people that surrounded me to provide me an identity. Now that I am an adult, I discovered how I am constantly using this past experience of finding oneself to find who I am today. Through art making, I narrate my emotions and how different experiences have hindered my formation of self-identity. It is this struggle of finding myself-identity that is the subject of my artworks.
My art is meant to begin a conversation, the exchange of words between people that happens without the word of mouth. It is a way of expressing and documenting my emotions. It is my dairy to the world. They tell the stories about my fears, desires, transformations and my being. Every composition deals with a part of my existence and each element in the work is a section of my life.
When I start my mark making, I start from an ending of a past experience. I do not and cannot draw my experiences, but rather as I feel them. I step back from my role of an author and instead take a place of seeker. I no longer state to observe the human figure, but rather I become the figure. The ending for me now becomes unseen and outside of my control. I am no more determining what to tell about the story, how to tell it and the way my viewers should see it. My body of work then becomes an extension of myself and my mark makings become records of my movements within time and space.
When drawing I use layers, lines, shapes, textures, and distortion to create ambiguous space. I want the viewer to move through the piece by following the lines, which vary from light to dark, thin to thick, straight to curvy. Though not totally volumetric, the layered composition helps to lead the viewer's eye into an illusionist space, manipulating their certainty of what it is they are seeing. One cannot fully figure out what the drawings contain. Yet when one looks closer, one begins to see all the details. It is only then that the images reveal themselves.
In my work, the use of symbolic and expressionistic depiction, rather than direct representation of myself, conveys the intense emotions that I am portraying in the artwork. The symbolism that I use in my work is not straightforward and varies in functions. It is the combination of whites of white and blacks of black; it is the negative and positive space created in my works. They sometimes appear to be a portal pulling my viewers in and they sometimes act as a barrier, stopping the viewers from knowing anything beyond that point. I believe that true expression is attainable through colorless means, because I believe that color forces the viewer’s eyes to notice its characteristics and influence the way they relate to the work projected. Black and white also has the tendency to link between the past and the present and illustrate a present emotion of nostalgia. Handwriting is also another symbolic instrument I depict in my artworks. It is another way of tracing my identity; it is a mark of my individuality. Though I write in different languages, when the written phrases come together they become one larger form and still retain that individuality of the writer.
The purpose of my works is to show, how my struggle, to find self-identity affects me both emotionally and mentally without direct depiction. Through the use of visual metaphor, I illustrated an autobiography, showing the struggle and the continuous battle of finding oneself between the identities created and or provided by society and culture.
My work begins a conversation with my audience. They question the viewer about who they are and leave them with a choice of being content or disturbed. Some of my audience might look at my work and feel like they know and have found their identity and some of them might look at my work and feel lost. My work is not about who is right or wrong, it is about my belief of finding oneself and how I have looked at other people for example and comparison in an attempt to find my ideal self. In these works, I search for that something called an Identity and I still search for that being called 'me’.