Carla Moss
Leeds
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I am an artist concerned with our relationship with the environment and with time and place. My journey began 20 years ago with an abstract take on ‘us and the environment’, documented through paintings of juxtaposing colours and forms.
The art works then moved into a period of large scale paintings and drawings depicting the tangible story of the shrinking Aral Sea (considered by some the worst environmental disaster of the twentieth century because of its speed and scale) in Kazakhstan / Uzbekistan, which seemed to me a microcosmic example of what we are doing to the natural world globally.
That led to a dialogue and questioning about where we are now and how we’ve arrived at a place where there is a remoteness and separation from our natural world. This separation seemed exemplified in our relationship to time, both historically: that nature was our ‘clock’, but also socially: in that as our priorities have shifted and changed, the ‘demands’ on ‘our time’ in our day-to-day activities has squeezed out a consideration for the natural world. I then started looking at time, something up until that moment I’d taken for granted. Why seven days? Why 24 hours? Why time zones? Who decided it? When did it come into being? What prompted it to happen? Why do we live by the rhythms we do and what happens when we change them. The questions are endless and each answer prompts a new question.
These questions and answers are explored in my art works. Recent pieces have included: small portable works (eg one off, handmade books), interventions in the environment (eg seed scattering), performances (eg documenting walks with paper in my shoes), drawings (eg of seeds, the moon and objects). The artwork unfolds with the research and thinking, sometimes incorporating it, sometimes summarising it, it provides a dialogue: a mirror to understand it better, a language to articulate the unknown.
Please see http://www.carlamoss.co.uk for more images.
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