MIXED MEDIA

MERGE MATERIALS to make NEW MEANING

Calculate creative collaborations that use mixed media materials like found objects, and a mixed bag of everyday elements to provide vast opportunities and meaning, to take abstract ideas to a new level of language, texture, and form. Objects and elements are applied structurally, or aesthetically depending on the project, to serve as meaningful messages for the viewer.

Everyday objects found in nature, or in an industrialized atmosphere offer tools or puzzle pieces to create psychological scenarios, or narratives, that stimulate viewers to explore their use from a common sense scenario in terms of how we relate to the elements in a real world context. Objects can also represent the idea that consumerism places our conscious choices in an arena of being buried in the deep sleep of illusion.

BLOCKS ON THE HORIZON meets THE FLOATER

mixed media on board, cut-out collage elements created with drill hole-cutter

SLEEP

Sleep represents the creative process of blanketing canvas in oil paint and burlap material on into a quilt of a subconscious colour matrix.

OPEN CLOTHES / OPEN CLOSE

Mixed Media on canvas, 17"X90"

The title “Open Clothes” serves as a “double entendre” linguistically meaning it has two interpretations with one being flirty as the meaning describes.

If someone asks you to open then close a door
it is a seemingly acceptable mundane request,
but change the request to open your clothes, to change the spelling and intent connotes a very different meaning, that can be perceived as containing a risqué flirtation.

People often play with words and meanings
to create psychological games.

According to the official definition, in literature a “double entendre” creates an ambiguity of meaning arising from language that lends itself to more than one interpretation. Life has many interpretations.

BUTTON-UP

“Open Clothes” is a psychological abstract portrait in meaning, materials, process, style and dimension that explores the art therapeutic psychological path which follows the act of “patience as a virtue” required to plan, develop and capture a complex deconstruction/construction using materials in an unconventional way to bring the inside out and build the outside in through the deconstruction and the “close” of life and self, and the act of opening up your “clothes” to reveal the naked flesh, to identify identity politics through the sewing and tearing apart of the cloth, the process of taking things apart in order to find ways to put everything back together - to put the outside in and the inside out – to generally try to put things right – for yourself.

CLOSE ALL THREADS

The two paintings "Open Clothes" and "Five foot nine inches" are sisters in arms in terms of standing strong in their fabulous feminine qualities to be shared proudly and positively with the world, to show that women have powerful tools that reach far beyond the bitterness of the gender war that is being constructed to deconstruct what we love – the men who acknowledge our strength and the children who learn from our compassion and steadfast ability to understand and move forward to create a strong voice for change – together. We have torn enough apart, now we need to sew things back together. I can only change myself, and through that change my example can change the minds of others. I am Shelley, I am a Woman – “Hear me Roar!”

Compositionally, “Open Clothes” is the twin sister piece or “the Ying in the Yang” to “Five Foot Nine Inches” as they share the same dimensions, but differ through different methods but together form two pillars of strength through learning to be a powerful woman despite all odds. In “Open Clothes” the idea manifests through reflection and the act of slowing down to take the time to know yourself rather than the immediacy of tearing yourself down through others judgment and giving way to the long journey required by this creative process.