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Sarah Nind Artist Statement My work employs both photography and painting in the production of a distinct body of work. The resulting images exhibit characteristics of photography as an expression and poetic medium - a recording device of the 'real' - while at the same time addressing painting as a dimension to express and record the emotional states and memories of the inner (subconscious) world. The images of my art production are not literal or linear in structure, but are constructed from fragmented and repetitive pieces, and represent a narrative of time, place, and memory. The work attempts to question how these histories and images live in our conscious and unconscious memories and affect our ways of seeing and perception of reality. In this way, my work questions history, the construction of time as a linear process, and the distinction between history (external body) and memory (internal body) in the process of defining identity. In this exploration the issue of identity is seen as an ongoing dialogue between the interior and the exterior, the private and the public, the imagined and the real, the poetic and the profane. Sited within languages of visual communication (paint, photography, and installation) this work intends to give expression to these forces in an effort to traverse the space between the interior and exterior projections of the body. The interface between the inner and the outer selves is the 'skin' - the porous membrane through which the body's inner reality rises to the surface, and the external world is absorbed and internalized. The painted or photographic surface, as visual language, is analogous to this dimension of communication from the interior and exterior body. Metaphorically, I see painting as being representative of the interior / emotional body, while the photography speaks of the exterior / physical body. The hand, as mediator to the act of painting, can be seen as a metaphor for the sensual body, while the traces of photography are the tools by which the conscious body finds expression in the outer world. By using photographs and by desiring to paint them, I am breathing life back into these images - I am giving back to memories of time and place the aura and mystery that has been lost in the photograph. My desire to paint my photography is actually a desire to authenticate or make unique a world that is fragmented and overexposed in the photographic image.
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