Lauren Merchant
Art Installation
Current Works
My current practice is working with surfaces and texture building, a surface revealing each layer, seeping through cracks and folds. Ongoing from the exhibition ‘Dimidium’ of the ‘passive’ piece, I have been ongoing with the process of sculpture, resulting in three- large panels, containing two sides. One of which is layers of newspaper and magazines, washed down with acrylic, emulsion and oil paint, resulting in gradients of colour, layering and texture. I have created an obscure image, a stencil manipulated from selected keywords of newspapers, signifying the subtlety of words, of how society takes notice of these ‘words’ without the realisation that they do. Working with enlarged prints, using symbolism, stencilled with black emulsion to represent hierarchy. The message is to represent the language that is partaken daily by the news. This becomes an act of language as a culture, passively reading ‘words’ from the media is repeated within a circulation in society, creating propaganda which becomes believable, but how much is fact?
PRINTS: (experimenting with snippets of newspaper text on print.) Using newspapers and magazines, that have been manipulated from emulsion, then worked over by print with Oil paint, creating a layered texture. Didn't want it to be too obvious that it was newspaper and magazines, I wanted the words to peek through subtly. The words of my print was also intentionally meant to be subtle, I want to make a point that the words are there, but what do we take in from those words.
EXPERIMENTATION: I cut out snippets of text which are layered onto my prints, these are keywords that were found in newspapers that interested me, because the stories behind where these words have come from, and the relation to the images, creates a slight humour. From thinking where the words have come from keeps you thinking of different stories, just how the media is created, as each paper has different headlines and stories for the same story. But what do you believe and what is the truth? It all starts from a word.