ELIZABETH MEAD
VARIOUS OBJECTS: THINGS ON THE HORIZON AND INKLINGS BY ELIZABETH MEAD AND CAREY BAGDASSariAN
May 11, 2013 - July 26, 2013
STATEMENT FOR VARIOUS OBJECTS: THINGS ON THE HORIZON BY ELIZABETH MEAD
This work is about looking. About taking the time to really look. I am not trying to tell you anything. I am inviting you to take a moment, stop what you are doing, just simply look and, perhaps, begin to see. I am always reminded of what Ivo Salvini says in Fellini's La Voce della luna, "I believe that if there were a bit more silence, if we all were a little bit quieter…perhaps then we could understand." These forms are simple, yet they take time to reveal themselves. They take time to understand.
I understand the world through physicality, location and through my mind. The largest expanse of space sits within my head. There the vastness of all I encounter physically merges with those moments just out of reach, those moments of discovery.
The drawings and objects I make are how I come to understand the world and my place in it. John Berger says that "any fixed contour is in nature arbitrary and impermanent…The challenge of drawing is to show us this, to make visible on the paper…not only discrete recognizable things, but also… show how the extensiveness is one substance…substance, harasses the act of drawing. …without this harassment the drawing remains a mere sign." These forms are not signs, they are not mimetic versions of a known entity. They are the mark on the paper, the form composed of wood or porcelain or paper twine. They are modest, somewhat quiet and often stubborn.
This assembly of drawings and objects is an attempt to recreate a landscape, one that originates in the Pacific Northwest and Wyoming and is planted firmly in my mind. I isolate elements in order to absorb them. Each form is like an individual rock or flora, a parsing of the landscape. I assemble them here in an attempt to form the landscape that exists in my mind as well as my body.
My deep gratitude to the Helen Riaboff Whiteley Center at Friday Harbor Laboratories and Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts for giving me the time and the space to make many of these drawings.
Elizabeth Mead
Panels from Inklings by Elizabeth Mead and Carey Bagdassarian
