Meandering

This is my artist statement linking all my new body of works in Meandering. Posted here might have more readers than on the gallery wall! I hope you enjoy the ideas behind the thread.

“Each meander has a life, a birth and a growth. 

Each one has a character, a feeling associated with…like music, like a poem...”

Beatrice is exploring the relationship between meanders and landscapes. Inspired by existing rivers, the meandering series respond to a semi abstracted bird eye view of the Earth. Meandering is the common thread, the link from one artwork to the other and it carries the journey.

The journey: Meandering through Google Earth, flying above the Australia coast and beyond, zooming in, framing, zooming out, moving again, surfing the clouds... all in search of the perfect meander.

Those ribbons of flow, nourishing the Earth and linking mankind create infinite permutations of shapes and forms within the constraints of the meander. Scale is of importance, balance in the cropping frame, details kept or fully abstracted, man made marks or natural forms, finding and being absorbed in the visual tension of certain geomorphologies, of certain landscapes.

A meander has a life, a birth, a growth. When mature, it has a full belly, a redundancy protruding till it bursts. Then flat and linear again before it re-flows, following an eternal repetitive cycle of growth.  Its life time is infinite and spatially moves around, walks around, eats around.  It can starve and shrink, and in the process creates crevasses and scars. Or flow and flood out of its very own bed, transforming its waist line, fattening it, and eating every piece of land or man-made forms in the process.

The process: Meandering through mediums and through scales. Alternatively focusing on the snake carving the Earth by highlighting and showing the river itself...physically scoring and carving my medium, then filling it with paints or glazes. Other times, the river and its meanders are painted or glazed first. Then come the surroundings, the backdrops, the backgrounds, and the feel for the area the ribbon is cutting in or adorning! Sometimes even the meander is just the excuse to be absorbed in the spatial abstraction of the landscape itself.

Meandering has been an internal journey, a constant search of self, all within the boundaries of my energy field and energy limits. Going downstream... floating with the flow, carving away my very own bed.