Artist Statement
Living and Re-Living Memory
In my work, I conceptually reflect on time and memory; specifically focusing on the traces and elusiveness of time. I want to encapsulate the haunting qualities of memory, the events and the situations that have happened that retain their capacity to live with you. To seize these qualities within my work and to visually record the traces that these experiences create.
I explore this materially through paintings, utilizing both oil and acrylic as they possess particular properties when applied to canvas or board that directly refer to the processes of memory; the use of pentimento to suggest underlying forms, laying down washes, images that slowly reveal themselves. I experiment with new materials and techniques and am introducing installations executed in various materials from paper, fabric, wood and metal, to accompany my paintings.
The relationship that my art has with the viewers and how they negotiate, approach and understand the work is important to me. I consider the viewer as an intruder, and appreciate a tender approach while entering the territory of the artworks. My visual influences and inspirations are from a range of sources; personal photographs, found imagery, literature, remembered dreams or memories that haunt me. My work does deal with time also and I am interested in sequentially and series, either figurative or abstract, and my ambition is to create a contemporary series of large historical paintings.
I realise that the elusiveness of time is relative and illusionary, something that we perhaps place upon how we understand time. For me, the past does not reside in another place it exists through memory and continues to haunt us. It often fades, sometimes it is revisited knowingly, corroded by our own revisions, sometimes it is experienced again involuntarily. My art is a way to deal with the memory and the past and to remember and also to heal.
Ludmila Muravjova