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Taking from a number of visual discourses and historical periods I transport images that represent excess, the grotesque, sexuality, technology and the body creating timeless, depthless collages upon the built interior environment as muralistic installations. The work dances on the surface of the wall creating an imaginary world in a transient medium. I perform in space, building up an energy, which is left through the trace of my body. Impermanence charges the work there is a sense of artistic suicide as the drawings are often destroyed existing only as documentation. My aim however is to share emotions that run riot within as I expel my frustrations upon the space. I am caught in the enjoyment of car crash culture, shock and stylized violence, the excess and over indulgences of society, opulence and ostentation, the cult of luxury and our addiction to kitsch. I am a fantasist claiming my heritage from surrealism, Bosch, Japanese Manga, H.R. Giger and Sci-fi films. The work brings together a range of visual expressions such as the comic strip, graffiti, the aristocratic mural, the doodle, anatomical engravings, anime and aristocratic embellishment as codes that I subvert and challenge.
Whether in situe or more recently on paper the drawings float in a non-space, an illusory, imaginary vortex suspended in time and space, a violent and erotic explosion of the interbreeding of disaster and growth, control and chaos. I am challenging accepted views within culture of truth and falsity, reality and delusion. The viewer is pulled into this floating, violent explosion but also left hanging on a surface of passive decoration, excessive baroque or all encompassing Victorian embellishment. Underneath lies the excessive, sexualized, grotesque, hybridization of body and technology, a weird reconfiguration of subjectivity, the possibility of sexualized machines, the fragmented body, a subject at the fringes of society and space, the loss of a singular fixed body is exploded into a plural mess, in flux and chaos, the possibility of total fluidity of the body, of morphing into something else, combining with technology, with surrounding space, architecture and objects that we use everyday, but also of ecstasy, harmony and transition as modes of ‘transportation’. This is all situated in a fantasy world where we have to decide whether these disturbances are real or not. Along the way we experience beauty that borders with decadence and grandeur but that verges on repulsion, we are taken on a visual journey of chaos and the fleeting nature of life itself, my life? One with no beginning or end, a monochrome dead space, but a space also full of life and possibility, a meeting ground, a space in which I aim to flourish.
Hannah Westwood
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www.hannahwestwood.com
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