These paintings are 30 x 30cm separate
box canvas panels. They were bought at $180 each and mixed and
matched as desired in trio’s, making their final dimensions
90 x 30cm. However, most sold before being put on the website.
This resulted in clients commissioning new paintings to their
requirements, some on a larger scale.
Each is untitled, yet correspond to a date in January 2004 as
explained in the exhibition statement below.
Paintings comprise of a large range
of mediums - acrylics, oils, semi and high gloss water based
enamel housepaint, blackboard paint, chalk, pastels, parafin
wax, sand, gravel, impasto medium, varnish, plaster of paris.
Please
note, Artwork can be clicked on for a larger view.
Exhibition Statement
Some philosophers suggest that at
birth; an infants mind having had no sensation impressed upon
it, will have it’s life and character shaped by experience.
Referral to the mind as Tabula Rasa – (Latin) ‘a
clean slate on which anything can be written’ is a main
feature of scholastics, used by Aquinas and Locke. Martin Heidegger
adapted it as part of his theories of Existentialism. Whether
or not we are the authors of our own actions along with other
casual factors outside our control, is a question that many
people ask themselves throughout life.
Sensory Data carries on a previous
theme involving diary work by Paula Cunniffe. This time, Cunniffe
chose to use her own personal diary recorded in January of 2004
as the basis of this series.
‘These canvases are an autonomic
response to each day in question. I am interested in the way
that humans store their sensory experience throughout life whether
they can consciously remember it or not. Then the way in which
it is drawn on and juxtaposed with other stored experience in
any given situation, creating an emotional response that is
unique to each person. Some of these works involve triggered
memories from childhood through smell, touch and sound; providing
insight into the ways I react in situations as an adult, experiencing
certain behavioural and thinking patterns. I was also curious
about the way in which computers stored data while watching
a routine defragmentation being done – the way it sorted
out chunks of information from here and there, slotting them
back into a comprehensible order within the hard drive. In the
age of artificial intelligence, emotion and sensory experience
cannot be reproduced autonomously by a computer. I think of
my compositions as chunks of emotion, stored as blocks of data
within the body and brain to make them understandable.’
– Cunniffe.
Techniques and Influences:
Abstract Expressionism is about psychic self-expression, and
is an attitude more than a style. In the 1940-50’s American
artist, Jackson Pollock developed a drip technique, a form of
action painting using automatism. Automatism is a method of
painting or drawing in which conscious control is suppressed,
allowing the subconscious to take over. A prodigy of Sigmund
Freud, psychoanalyst Carl Jung used it in a therapeutic situation
where the patient was able to tap into suppressed memories.
The Surrealists and Dadaists of the 1920-30’s in Europe
first used it to express the unconscious in the art world. The
text works of Colin McCahon also play an influence in Sensory
Data.
