Tag Archives: Imagination

Consciousness in context

“My focus is consciousness.  First, consciousness from the body and mind, then as it relates to its inherent contexts, history, religion and culture.”

Lewis deSoto is an American artist of Cahuilla Native American ancestry. His multimedia installations combine sound, light, video, space, and sculpture elements and are site-specific or oriented toward making a complete environment. His conceptual artwork utilizes automobiles, inflatables, electronics, photography, wood and metal construction. In this exclusive interview he discusses his ideas and work.

Fleeting Light

“I am interested in time and temporality; our relationship to time and our perception of time. The vocabulary I often employ is fleeting light….Creating scenarios wherein the viewer is made aware of the present moment and transitory moments.”

Miya Ando is an American artist whose metal canvases and sculpture articulate themes of perception and ones relationship to time. The foundation of her practice is the transformation of surfaces. In this exclusive interview she discusses her ideas and work.

The Search for a Brave New World Aesthetic

Jasmine Pradissitto describes herself as “a practising Quantum Artist and Creativity Warrior”, a “painter who sculpts with light and colour using the scientific knowledge accumulated over years of experience”, creating ‘holograms you can touch’. Forms inspired by nature, the human condition and scientific breakthroughs, are melted and reshaped from plastics into sculptures as a commentary on an ever increasingly Anthropocene world.

Albion

Stephen Walter’s drawings are a tangle of signs, words and images that draw the viewer into the artist’s intricate worlds. His work is crowded with today’s (sub)cultural symbols and obsessive tendencies; but it also celebrates traditional techniques, craftsmanship and Romantic notions of place.

Thinking on the Pages of Sketchbooks

Elisa Alaluusua originates from Finnish Lapland and has been exhibiting internationally since the beginning of 1990s. Her first degree was in drawing (1991), since then she has completed two MAs, one in UK (Environmental Art, 1995) and one in Finland (Art Education, 1999), and practice-based PhD at the University of the Arts London (2016) on the topic of Sketchbooks. In 2015 she won the second prize in the prestigious Jerwood Drawing Prize with her video/drawing ‘Unconditional Line’.

This article is based on her PhD research ‘Sketchbooks – A Comparative Analysis of the Use of Sketchbooks by Contemporary Artists’ and makes an attempt to get a better understanding of how thinking happens on sketchbook pages and what visual form it might take.

Flood Story – Drawing the Anthropocene

“My approach to drawing is twofold. Firstly to use it as a tool to get out and examine the stuff of the world, to gather information and record experience. Secondly, as a means to construct narratives which communicate what I think and feel. These latter drawings often play out themes of environmental and social change, most recently speculation on the effect of global warming and rising sea levels.”

Gerry Davies is Senior Lecturer at Lancaster University and an artist who writes on drawing. He is ‘less interested in what drawing is, more interested in what it can do’. His work seeks to get a better understanding of how and where drawing today is engaging with subjects beyond the arts, in for example, science, medicine, and anthropology.

Sound Works

Naomi Kashiwagi is an award-winning artist who produces sound works, installations, performances and works on paper, that draw upon her cultural heritage, an intrinsic fusion of two cultures, British and Japanese. Drawing is central to Kashiwagi’s practice and she makes drawings using a range of media including diamonds, typewriters, gramophones and pianos, as well as graphite and pen.