Lorraine Fossi

Artist Statement

I was trained as an architect; from this I have kept a particular way to encounter ideas and forms, including every part of what I encounter within a vaster plan. 

My art practice has to do with re-assembling the fragmented and the void of separation, in an actual and a metaphorical sense. It allows new connections between elements that I thought would not meet and creates new points of entry to encounter the world, the walls, and all surfaces.  

My work emerges from the territory of abstraction, in the way that an architect starts with the abstract and works toward the real world within which moments, places and memories and desire reappear – and become something that is new.  It finds echoes in the theory of the Rhizome by Deleuze and Guattari that allows for multiple, non- hierarchical entry and exit points in data interpretation and representation. My work travels from reality to abstraction, but it also constructs a bridge between the two states. Structures and details in the world become abstracted into diagrams, which can then be instantiated in other materials and in other contexts.

It investigates aspects of time and distance –measurement and perspective – and maps out journeys and migration. In my work the ‘surface’ is a ‘territory’ and refers in colour and texture to the world’s materiality: it is often grey like the pavement of cities, and covered with scuffs, marks and imprints. I paint with acrylic and oil paints- scribbles and measuring lines visible on the surface. I choose my materials, according to the diagram, from a wide range of materials culled from everyday life and sometimes include ‘found objects’. It allows new connections between elements that I thought would not meet and creates new points of entry to encounter the world.

In my artworks, painting is a function, switching from different perspectives, with space for the viewer to imagine moving, measuring, stepping back, and also resting. My work is abstract work that can contain within it air and openness, solid compressed blocks of memory which somehow sustain an immediate clarity. The diagram is a free and open aspect in my artworks and fuels travel, events and thoughts that appear and reappear. Space is created and deconstructed: the painting is in a state of ‘a becoming’.