STRATA

East Gallery, Claremont Graduate University, March 2020

The works in this show explore the idea of landscape as something ephemeral, fragile, mediated, specific and intimate.  They are rooted in my practice of drawing from life and photographing textures and shadow patterns. The paintings weave together elements of these drawings and photographs. Some details are amplified, others are subtracted, until a sense of place emerges. Line-work and manipulated photographic imagery combine with colour and pattern to investigate the powerful tension created between the universal and the particular, and the real and the imagined.

Via materials, mark-making and colour choices, Strata explores the way humans are intertwined with the landscape physically,  emotionally and imaginatively in paintings that celebrate the kind of places and experiences that are, or will soon be, lost to us through our impact on climate change.

My experience behind the camera in documentary has informed the process of making these paintings. The habit of looking, framing, recording and then editing has echoes in my process of gathering materials from my experience in nature and bringing them back to the studio to explore them more deeply.

I approached these paintings like poems, structuring them so that elements are not merely strung together for the sake of the thoughts they convey, but with an eye to patterns of similarity, opposition, rhythm and parallels. My painting process is associative and non-linear so that photo transfers of pavement cracks can draw to mind a rock face, spray paint can evoke a shadow, and pigment buckling the surface of collaged paper embodies rather than represents a sedimentary flow.  

The paintings are a place to investigate how materials and marks can be interlaced and overlapped to create spaces that defy logic yet somehow still make sense. Distinct moments and viewpoints are conflated into one delicately balanced construct: like a dream space whose elements are held in balance only in the mind of the dreamer.

Amanda Mears