Our featured artist this month has also shown her work in both of our Galleries New Haus and Kofferraum, so do head over there to see more of Rosemary’s pieces.
I am a Sheffield-based fine artist exploring notions of memory (time place experience dream) through drawings paintings photographs videos and artists’ books and encompassing chance intuition and spontaneity.
After originally training (for many years) and practising (only a very few years) as an architect I subsequently studied fine art, practising as a fine artist, and for over 30 years, as an adult art educator.
I am a member of Sheffield Printmakers and the Sheffield Artist Book Centre and Bookness Collective artist book groups.
1 - Could you explain your practice? Only you know why you do what you do.
My practice is concerned with notions of memory exploring my personal response to and forming a record of the constantly shifting and multi-layered nature of memory which blends and blurs over time into a personal version of history. It is a process that is
continually explored developed and refined as the memories themselves constantly reshape reform and transform in the process of recollection, in which the memory-image has been reduced over time to an abstraction of line and space.
We have little control over our memory - memories often form unexpectedly or do not reveal themselves when required. Memory itself is a complex fragmentary and
multi-layered process as individual memories are constantly reshaped from day to day and over weeks months and years, becoming less well-defined, fragmented, multi-layered or abstract and assuming greater or lesser significance.
For many years a substantial body of my work has been centred around the memories of experiences and dreams of a particular place on the east coast of England, a liminal
ambiguous and changeable ‘edge-of-the-world’ place, a boundary between terrestrial and marine environments subjected to change by the actions of man and the natural forces of erosion and deposition and ebb and flow over time. In a constant state of physical and
visual flux, it continually reveals and conceals evidence of those actions, in the process creating its own ‘memory’ and acting as a metaphor for the shifting and multi-layered nature of memory itself.
This body of work has developed over recent years into an open-ended ongoing print-based research project exploring the inter-relationship between the 2-dimensional printed image, book formats and the 3-dimensional form, where the abstracted memory-image has been fractured and fragmented by hand-cutting and folding blind embossed prints and emerges through the play of light falling across paper.
2 - Is art relevant today?
Yes - It can challenge us and open not only our eyes but all our senses to new ways of viewing and understanding the world we live in and our place in it and make us question our understanding what we think we ‘know’ of subjects such as the environment, society, politics, race and gender.
3 – We are always asked what other artists influence us, we want to know what art you don’t like and which influences you?
I dislike art that is pretentious and / or requires a lengthy explanation often in language which excludes those outside academia, art criticism and the art market.I do not generally explain my work as I prefer the viewer to make their own interpretation - the work therefore does not have a descriptive title only a reference number.I am unable to think of any art I dislike which influences me at present.
L.XXIX.LXX.XXX.II.I 2019
4 – If you could go back 10-20 years what would you tell your younger self?
Go for it!
5 – If you could go forward 10-20 years what do you hope to have done or not done?
I would like to have continued to create work, to have explored ideas and to have developed my practice.
Connect with Rosemary here…