Judith Burrows

Artist Statement

Judith Burrows    Artist Statement

Judith Burrows’ film and photography background plays a significant role in her mixed media images. Her interests are in exploring place; our relationship to our surroundings, the unique resonance of a particular location, and the woven narrative in the context of the contemporary. While each location has an intrinsic and unique socio-political and historical significance, research photographs using several different cameras and old film stock taken as reference, reveal a variety of alternative dialogue. New narrative layers are exposed that provide inspiration and the starting point for her mixed media artwork. Abstract mono-prints created using a variety of papers, still photographs, text, and relevant found material are worked over with layers of oil paint, gouache, and ink. By overlapping in repetitive layout and composition, and intensifying the particularities of light and graphic elements, the relevance and emotional intent of a location is slowly unraveled. The narratives that emerge are rooted in contemporary political and social context; the daily news and world events influence the course of the image and create an on-going debate. Meanwhile, the multiple layers and textures with color over Black and White, seem to challenge concepts of time and memory, combining a sense of age and agelessness, in the embedded episodes, played out like a series of film stills. This is exaggerated by the presence of small, lone figures that appear lost or awkward….perhaps a reflection of the artists own inner response to political chaos and uncertainty.

MA study at the RCA has compounded these ideas. Lostness, Uncertainty and Disempowerment, Precarity and Fragility. I am exploring ideas of apprehension of the individual and of society, in the global chaos and current ecological crisis. The original concepts began with the localised political and societal unease in UK in 2018, 2019, and have gravitated into the wider global concerns and the vulnerability of humanity in relation to the environment. I am exploring the connectivity of the universe, the fragile reliance that all inhabitants and habitats have on each other and the vulnerability of the ‘infrastructure’.     

My ideas are reflected in cold, hard metals, fragile sharp glass,­­­ and degradable papers: materials that decay and atrophy with time, waste materials that have been discarded, abandoned. On canvas, lone figures, empty streets, husks of buildings in vast landscapes stretch to infinity. On metal, layers of mild steel, and copper are degraded by natural and man-made processes, and human intervention creating a disorder The papers, mined metals, and minerals, processed for human usage, are returned to a more precarious form. The fragility of glass, is a container for the rust dust, or acid effluent of decay.                   The metal begins as formless sheets of manufactured product that I leave exposed to the elements. Natural processes of corrosion, and decay; wind, rain, and sun, are harnessed in a controlled environment using a mix of corrosive substances, and vegetation. Degraded to a point of fragility, a breaking point, the materials are then carefully ‘re-worked’, printed, and imprinted, painted, or welded together in sculptural form for connective installation. They convey an unrefined quality, the paper torn and fragile, the canvas razed and rough, the metal crude and indelicate, expressing a vulnerability with razor-sharp edges.  The rich tones that emerge in each process reveal sublime colours of pollution, in contrast with the coarseness of the materials. The works become a collaborative theatre, interacting and connecting with each other. A cube, small and vulnerable hangs in precarious isolation on the wall. A field of instability, a wasteland of objects, a sense of society collapsed, a sense of loss.