RESONANCE

ARTIST STATEMENT by Judith Burrows

“Make yourself one with dust.
This is the profound identity. The eternal profundity
between man and nature ….. of ash and the earth from which
we come and from which we return”
(Antonio Tapies from Tao te Ching)

My fine art practice involves a visceral and meditative immersion of self with matter on an intuitive, telepathic, instinctive level. An interaction with nature, the elements and raw steel; materials that decay and atrophy with time, in turn becoming absorbed back into the earth. Photosynthesising vegetation in spring-summer, lifeless matter in autumn-winter: stirred by wind, frozen under ice and snow, burnt by the midday sun: a conversation between nature, the materials and process.

A tension develops between the organic in transformation, in dialogue with the unstable manufactured, in turn influenced by the elements and the seasons that conveys a sense of intransigence and impermanence; Annica.

I am exploring this in relation to ‘Revelations’.

The text, CHAOS IN PARADISE, stark and uncompromising lettering in layers of clear varnish printed prior to the organic process, presents a provocation to the dialectic … an interruption. A filigree network of patterned rust eats into the surface of the letters holding an uncertain future mirroring the gradual disappearance of species.

The challenge is imprinting emotion into matter, while materialising intangibles such as uncertainty, ‘lostness’, precarity in the knowledge that on the borderline between control, and relinquishing control, I have little authority in this ever-changing, sensual, conjugal, non-hierarchical process.

At a point of vulnerability what is revealed are rich tones and form
decided by nature in the printed outlines of the source material
fragility on the surface in metamorphosis;
a palimpsest holding memory in process:
a rebirth.

RESEARCH COMMENTARY by Judith Burrows & Joseph Boyd

The destructive ambitions and limits of human power, portrayed with apocalyptic outcomes as recounted in the Book of Revelation, appear mirrored in 2021. It is a time of uncertainty and global precariousness, exacerbated by the hierarchical status that humanity claims, and the chaos and instability that ensues through climate crisis, causing the annihilation and displacement of ‘lesser’ species. Our planet’s natural order is undermined, creating fragile eco-systems, contradictions in the tenuous relationship of humans with nature, and vulnerability on many levels.

Lostness

At a time of disconnection, the hope is for connectivity, an affinity between humanity and the natural world. While the Book of Revelation documents destruction of the planet, ‘Apocalypse’ originally indicated an ‘unveiling’, the creation of a new and better one with a greater understanding of the universe, the living environment and the value of all sentient entities and organisms.

I see revelation as an awakening to the inter-relatedness of all living beings putting aside the anthropocentric worldview and looking at the deep ecological connections by illuminating the wholly co-dependent relationship
between humanity and the natural world ‘in morphic resonance.’

In the months of lockdown and beyond, myself in a solitary and uncertain state, alternative ways of sensing the natural world took place; an exchange through corrosion and decay that replicate a synchronicity of form and allow nature to respond in ways imagined, projected, and real

Steel and organic matter in conversation
is interrupted by my constant intervention,
a meditative dialogue
between myself and the universe.