Inter Art

Annie Gunning

Concept

Traces of history, revealed as plans of buildings, towns and unexplained hieroglyphs, are imprinted on the landscape and visible fleetingly from the air. This distance lends mysterious enchantment to a game of hide and seek, a subterranean past briefly revealed on a surface present.

Translating shapes and marks from aerial photographs through paint, these traces formed the starting point for my invented landscapes and their histories.

This renewed adventure with paint lead me to explore Decalcomania, a process of sandwiching paint between two surfaces which are pulled apart, causing the paint to gather itself up unpredictably, creating branching, fronding patterns.

From this raw beginning, I extract an image of which I have no pre-conception; paint is my subject matter; as though trying to return to its origins, it becomes river beds, ammonites and aerial views of coastlines. Intricate frondings and etchings suggest frost, lichen, curious fungi, and the marks of an ebbing tide - leading me back to the landscape where I began.

Extending this process using crushed charcoal and cigarette ash, through these cremated materials fragments of emotional landscapes emerge, Phoenix-like from the ashes, to mourn the loss of places that will change and people I will never see again.