'Transmute'- Kathryn Haug

Artist’s Statement

Transmute

Transmutation- Change into another form, nature or substance; (alch.) change of baser metals into gold etc.; (geom..) change of figure or body into another of same area or content... (The Concise Oxford Dictionary)

Knowledge- n. Knowing, familiarity gained by experience, (of person, thing, fact); person’s range of information...

These works engage with subjects that are familiar to me. I have painted family members and childhood friends; I have drawn from family photos of things and places I remember, or things I think I remember. There is a feeling of connection with the subjects; a sense of knowing.

However, as I start to analyse these subjects and start to transmute them into paint, a distance is created and I view the subjects as something unknown or abstract. My sister becomes a collection of shapes; a series of marks interacting. The landscape that I felt I remembered is analysed, simplified and broken down into dark and light, negative spaces, marks, textures: paint.

The subjects that are familiar to me are made more ambiguous and non-specific through the processes of painting. In places they begin to border on abstraction- where it is the paint, the colours and the marks that have the most significance.

Although in some ways these subjects have become unknown, in other ways they have become more known: they have been scrutinised, broken down into parts and re-constructed with paint.

Please follow this link for a review of Kathryn's show in Colosoul magazine: http://colosoul.com.au/colosoul_2.0/?p=11017