Abstracted

Fractal Figure #2 (detail)

Sometimes your art can take a quantum leap. You are going along slowly, moving from project to project, honing your techniques, steadily progressing in your thinking.

Then one day you make a quantum leap. The work you have done only a day before has ‘conceptually ‘jumped’ and you have move into a whole new method of making.

It happened to me during this second week of my artist residency. Somewhere between day 13 and day 14 my artwork leapt into abstraction. I could feel it coming and manifesting in subtle ways, shifting my focus from a big picture landscape, to the fine details of leaf litter on the forest floor. From there I turned my gaze on the shape of the bark ‘fractals’, those irregular shapes that are the strange patterns found in nature.

How did this happen? Could it be because we have been cut off all week by 100 year floods which have effectively stopped us from going anywhere. It meant that we have had to ‘make do’ with what was in the fridge and stay put in the studio, making.

Enforced limitation can also push your creativity. With no access to further supplies from home, I had to be inventive with what materials I had brought with me. I started off this artist residency at BigCi in Bilpin, with 8 buckets of coloured cotton pulp and now have used up most of the colours. 

I have kept green, blue and white for my open day pulp pouring demonstration, which left purple, red and a bit of black and grey.  The third forest landscape I created focused on the tree root system which then ‘jumped’ into an abstraction. Outlined in black, it become a ‘larger than life’ character of its own.

It was joined on day 15 and 16 by two more fractal figures. I wondered where they came from so larger than life and remember back to a year ago in April when I started drawing fractal shapes for my daily 10 x 10 cm artworks. They too wanted their own story and became the ‘Bent family fractals’, each with their own colour representing our family (even the dog).

Obviously, these tiny critters have been in the wings waiting for me to have the space and time to let them loose on the world. Enforced time in the large studio space limited my materials but expanded my use of them and my thinking. I certainly had not planned it and yet here they are out in the world. I made a little video of figure #2 being liberated from the screen. You can watch it here.

Forest Landscape #3 - detail of tree root system, the ‘jumping off’ point into abstraction.