Statement

My work seeks ways to evoke the sense of touch, inviting an intimae, tactile visuality. Body processes, such as breathing, whispering, opening, folding and fluidity are invoked to create slippage between bodies and objects as well as to exploit haptic modes of looking which set the conditions making possible the sensation for experience of an erotics of visuality, which in turn can produce feelings of embodied engagement. I make use of a range of making-strange strategies – to make the familiar strange in order to make it more familiar and more intimate again - these processes involve the alteration of bodies and objects through touch. The feelings of movements, of opening and folding within the work bring touch and the workings of desire together in the site of practice, in particular in my use of palimpsestic concepts and techniques. In Grotto I hope to offer a shared space where meetings can take place between how I touch the world and how others can recognize their own ways of being and touching. A grotto represents a place apart – a place that opens up unexpectedly. My interest as an artist in grottos as openings, as geographies of space and light shadow and texture and fluidity - and in the way they represent liminal retain associations was transitional or liminal spaces as thresholds.

My work is comprised of moving images and altered objects. It involves an activation of space to create a place that opens up unexpectedly for the viewer – invites the viewer in – inviting the viewer to pause, to touch, to move through. Created through multiple processes of making strange, bodies, objects and places have been layered together with memory, suggesting carnality and embodiment as well as qualities of landscape and interiors. My desire has been to create a sense of intimate space-becoming-place to encourage a sensory encounter for those who enter it. The cluster of made-strange fetishized cups as poetic insertions in the corner space, simultaneously hide and reveal their porcelain surfaces -as three-dimensional palimpsests made to be touched, felt the cups resonated with the wall projection - where the source is also porcelain - which allows me to reinforce the visual connections already operating. The moving images were created through processes of making strange - overlaying and semi-erasing images of altered objects with fluid - poured water and milk thus combining fluidity in relation to the multiple surface qualities already present in the work.

My work is a practice of space, surface and materiality, in which an inquiry of space is made by the ways in which materiality is transformed in and by space allowing something like a ‘feminine erotic’ and / or ‘feminine aesthetic’ to come into play. As feminist strategies for exploring productive desire, working with haptic looking evokes the kind of erotic tactile visuality needed to encourage an embodied encounter in my work. The moving imagery shifts eroticism from the site of what is represented to the surface of the image itself. Eroticism arrives in the way a viewer engages with the surface and in a movement between the surface and the depth.

In my work the loss of boundaries and the movement across surfaces from one texture and density to another, is charged and sustained by haptic or intimate looking. Haptic visuality, evokes desire through a complex act of looking, inviting an embodied response in which the viewer draws close, pulls way, draws close again, through processes of interacting up-close with the moving image, close enough that ground and figure commingle….whereby the viewer gives up visual mastery, loses his / her separateness from the image. In this way the kind of erotic haptic looking evoked in and by the moving imagery shifts eroticism from the site of subject matter to the act of looking itself.

Recurring sounds of breathing, my echoing voice and running water serve to suspend the viewer among various effects of time, space and materiality, prolonging the experience of embodied looking. I use sound to bring the viewer closer to the moving images. Strategies of dispersion and dissolution in conjunction with surface movement evoke a quality of intimacy, suggesting sensual openings on the body, although the image is not of body but of objects made-strange. The viewer, uncertain as to what he/she is looking at, may tend to draw close the surface, and hopefully enter into an encounter with it.

Judy Anderson 2010