This series explores what we leave behind and how we will be thought of centuries later. Archeology has been a background interest in my artistic practice through the completion of several courses during my education. This interest is once again referenced in Untitled. Much of what we know today about past civilizations are often found through garbage piles or artifacts discarded while looting as many are preserved by natural elements. Bog bodies, whose skin is turned to leather due to their burial place in a swamp, or Pompeii, and the preservation of people curled up and buried with ash is one example of such an artifact. This is where I choose to explore; how we might be found centuries later and what this would look like, and say about us as people, in an ode to a mapping of this future, and unintentional burial and mutilation through preservation.
The materials I used in this piece were intentionally fragile and sewn together to elaborate on the fragility of humans to nature. Tracing paper, for myself, is a medium used to replicate images. In this piece, I have drawn on both sides of the sheet and bound it together with sewing thread to evoke a strong notion of clothing and mending of a larger item. This large artwork is then drawn in individual cross-hatching on both of the sections that stick out of the paper to integrate the idea of “terrain”. The image I abstracted of a bog body (a repeating image throughout my works), is then raised through the crumpling of paper which has been sewn into my canvas. This represents the preservation of the land and its impact on humankind. An artist that loosely influenced my work is that of Alina Szapocznikow, especially her Fetishes Series, of which I looked at because of her use of body and abstraction almost to the point of mutilation.
The other image I used in my collage is one of the natural but extreme terrains that mimics the lines of the body ridges on the bog body. The interplay within the two implies the complex nature between Man vs Nature and creates tension between the two images, despite the same technique used to draw them.
