Linda King Ferguson
Vermont College of Fine Arts
Untitled
Acrylic on paper, mounted on panel
19" x 20"
Paint performs space. Paint becomes by performing the space of perception. Amy Sillman said, "The experience of abstract painting is about having a body." Paint is the body of memory; a filter for affect of the perceived moment and the liminal space between what is inside our self and what is outside. If each moment, in what Jean-Luc Nancy calls "space-time", is the conception of matter put forward through action, abstract painting references the remembered traces of experience both through intentional perception and through material. My work articulates the landscape of organic forces and elements: structure in the space of light, and atmosphere. I draw with paint directly from experience, in plein air and in the studio, investigating emotional architecture through surface texture, pattern, and form. Abstracting from the abstract. Representing the affect of experience. My process, of paint performing space, is an additive archeology. I integrate and interchange figure and ground producing form and space as whole cloth. By selective construction and production, I excavate markings and strokes of observation, which become visual impressions in the physical vestige of the paint body. Paint becomes archive. It leaves traces of memory and the ethics of its making. As a productive performance, paint both documents and perpetuates filtered layers of time and place and it is paint as paint. Paint performing space is a trajectory of actuality, locating a new space, one with its own order.
"Untitled, my Wet Paint 2011 submission, specifically juxtaposes historical hue structure and theatrical light with contemporary materials, methods, and form construction.
Special gratitude to Michelle Grabner, Marie Shurkus, Blair Vaughn-Gruler, and Lesley Vance for inspiration.