Page 4 - Summer Readings

Tricia Gillman
Tricia Gillman

Moment Fields at Benjamin Rhodes Arts 2023, clarified for me a growing
interest in the relationship between events mapped out, in real time, on the
bare, vulnerable surface of cotton duck, and the awareness of the need to make
reference to intimations of ‘that which lies beneath’. Consciousness inevitably
gathers together the now and the then. The word ‘veiled’ began to echo as
a metaphor for both explicit and implicit obscuration, the hiding and revealing
(both conscious and unconscious,) of layers of awareness and understanding.
The need was to find ways of exploring how our perception is often clouded,
veiled, obscured by what we think we see on the surface, which can often
prevent us seeing what is in reality before us.

I became interested in finding ways to move from the surface ‘skin’ of the canvas,
through and into an internal space, as though peeling back the layers of the
onion to reveal the life beneath the surface. The materials, process and structural
shifts are driven by content-hence the multiple layers, the use of see-through
muslin, the revealing of the usually hidden stretcher bars, along with the just
visible words and markings below.

In addition to these ‘layers beneath’, more layers have been appearing above,
in the form of a build-up of collaged elements, like snatches of experiential
awareness or discrete inter-linked moments. The aim is to focus our attention
on the opposition between surface/beneath, above/below, external/internal;
contrasting the physicality and tactility of the surface with the slippery and
ephemeral glimpses below.

Through these material and structural shifts, I am seeking to make the invisible
visible, to find ways of mapping the layers and disruptions inherent in our often
unclear, constantly changing, relationship with reality.