Whilst creating a previous painting entitled The Enchantment of the Anthropocene, cyborg-like creatures began to emerge, seemingly willing themselves into the painting and the narrative.
They’ve since become a recurring theme, morphing into additional compositions, sculptures and characters on subsequent paintings.
These allude to evolutionary biology, where ‘descent with modification’ is widely discussed, revealing that all species, including the human species, were not created by some pre-ordained design, but rather as a result of a series of fairly random modifications. Those modifications which were favourable to the current environment, would be the ones that would survive, only to mutate even further as millenia went by.
Possibly in a parallel dimension, living species could look like the creatures that I’ve been creating in my paintings and sculptures, still made up of the self-same atoms, but in wildly different combinations and concentrations. They offer the viewer a Post-Humanist viewpoint that argues against the idea of Anthropocentrism. They argue the idea that everything matters, because we are all interconnected and made from the same matter.
Whilst returning to an older composition, I conducted a new material investigation into making my own sculpting material. Here I’ve started with a wire armature base, followed by aluminium foil to create the basic shape. Thereafter, I experimented with making a papier-mache style clay out of recycled boxes and paper, and wallpaper glue. The making of the clay was a lengthy process which was very messy, but I found the clay to be pliable and good to work with. The finished product was smooth while wet, but as it dried, the paper pulp became grainy and bumpy, which wasn’t the effect I was after at all.
Debbie New 