Summer 2021
When I walk in my neighborhood, I am walking my childhood, my youth, my adulthood, my middle age, and the history of the land itself. Time spreads all the way back and all the way forward. My footsteps mark the map, sewing together the past, present and future. My work is generated from these walks, with ideas coming from movement and from direct observation and encounters with the natural world that exists sub rosa in urban/suburban life. The pieces I produced this summer, including animation, printmaking, digital print, and small scale sculpture, are all extensions of this daily walking practice.
While my work elucidates a personal vision that uses nature as a mirror for the self, it is also invested in the unity of nature and humanity. The aim of the work is to express the love, fear, peace, awe, and identification with the natural world that I inhabit, that is here, under my very feet, is the air I breathe and the water I drink, is the weed cracking the asphalt, the bunny eating all the flowers, the mourning dove not escaping the cat, the goose that poops all over everything– this is a love and respect of place, no matter how degraded and abused, that is home, that goes beyond words to the core of my being.
This morning I read that the UN has issued a report that the earth has passed the point of being able to stop climate change. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/ Anything we do now, which needs to be drastic, will only mitigate how hot it is going to be. We are living in a time of necessary change that we, as a society, have avoided acknowledging. The local animals and plants that I document and that appear in my work are under extreme stress. We need an existential shift in our collective viewpoint. We are one with this planet. We cannot afford to pretend any longer that we are separate from the natural world.
Major Studio IV
In Major Studio I wrestled with understanding and communicating my concept more clearly to sharpen the work. Yo Ahn and I discussed the digital imagery going from being projected onto an object in 2019 to becoming an integral part of the object in 2021. We also discussed the personal meaning of birds, the investigation of the sublime, and the theme of presence and absence in the work.
I have started reading Levinas’ Totality and Infinity, Stoichita’s A Short History of the Shadow, Robert MacFarlane’s, The Old Ways, and MIT/Whitechapel’s anthology Gothic. I am beginning to seriously research and keep a document of sources for local history, botany, and the story of the land around me to ground the work I am doing. This is an ongoing process spanning several years of reading and absorbing to collate and present.
Digital Collage on Fabric
I re-engaged with this interrupted work from 2020, as I finally had access to the digital print lab after waiting a year and a half. These digital prints are collages from daily walks in April 2020, a selection from the year of August 2019-2020. There are two prints hung together: behind, the image is printed on cotton; in front, the same image is printed on silk. Image 4 has silkscreen motifs printed on the top layer as well. In the fall I will research a hanging method that preserves the lightness and fluidity of the cloth.
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- Nero, April 2020, 24″ x 10″ digital collage print on cotton and silk
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- Nero, April 2020, 24″ x 10″, digital collage print on cotton and silk, side view
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- No Trespassing, April 2020, 24″ x 10″, digital collage print on cotton and silk
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- Triptych, 3 panels 24″ x 10″, digital collage print on cotton and silk with silkscreen
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- Nero, April 2020, 17″ x 34″, digital collage print on cotton and silk
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- Path, April 2020, 17″ x 34″, digital collage print on cotton and silk
Sculpture
Upon arrival to campus, I realized that I needed to change my sculptural plans and focus on parts of my work that did not require access to specialized studios. (See below, A Note on Gardening without Gloves). I experimented with colored, hand painted, and digitally printed vellum, looking for translucency and lightness, reacting to the heavy black bird shadow puppet created in the spring semester. I also incorporated an interior light source.
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- Multicolored Wing, 3″ x 12″, hand painted translucent yupo paper, copper wire
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- Invasive Species, 6″ x 10″, digital images printed on vellum, floral wire
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- Brown Wing, 6″ x 3″, hand painted yupo paper and t pin
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- Pinned, 18″ x 12″, translucent vellum, t-pins
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- Flight, 6″ x 7″, translucent vellum
Sculpture with Light
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- Brown Wing, 6″ x 4″, hand painted yupo paper, t pin and LED light
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- Flight, 6″ x 7″, translucent vellum, LED light
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- Flight v2, 6″ x 7″, translucent vellum, LED light
Animation
In the animation studio I was captivated by the stop motion animation process. It was a natural way of thinking that I wish to incorporate more fully into my practice going forward.
Prey from Eileen De Rosas on Vimeo. Reaction piece to Lyotard’s The Sublime and the Avant-Garde.
wing from Eileen De Rosas on Vimeo.
Digital Tools & Techniques + Animation
Footprints
In the Digital Tools and Techniques class I worked on refining and understanding aspects of Premiere Pro for projecting images and on using Photoshop to create simple frame animations.
Below are a series of pieces based on the idea of feet walking through the landscape. The first is an ink painting stop motion animation. The second two are based on water prints of my feet on newsprint and digitally animated in Photoshop and After Effects. This is still a work in progress, technically and conceptually. The final version will be projected onto the floor.
footprints sketch from Eileen De Rosas on Vimeo.
footsteps projection draft from Eileen De Rosas on Vimeo.
Printmaking
In printmaking I experimented with silkscreen and wood block. Since the digital print lab was available, I was able to print digital collages on fabric. Then I silk screened imagery on top of the digital image. I am intrigued by the translucency of washi paper and the possibility of using printed imagery in a sculptural context. This is also a process I would like to investigate more fully.
Woodcut on Rives and Washi paper.
Woodcut on washi paper with light
Silkscreen on Arnhem and Stonehenge paper
Silkscreen on Paper and Fabric
A Note on the Danger of Gardening without Gloves
Nature is not a safe space!
In June, while removing a pernicious weed (black swallow wort, a poisonous invasive species deadly to monarch butterflies) that had sprouted under a rose bush, I managed to get a microscopic piece of thorn embedded in my left index finger. It was so small that it healed over quickly and I couldn’t remove it. Roses protect themselves by carrying bacteria and fungus on their thorns, the doctor told me, my finger swelled as much as a finger can swell, sitting in her office as she poked at me with a pair of tweezers. After six weeks of doctor visits and antibiotics, hopeful moments of relief (the thorn worked its way out!), crushing moments of reality checking (I will not be able to use my finger for another two weeks), my swollen and painful digit saga culminated in surgery the final week of the residency. I am left handed, and I was without my heavily leaned upon, customary dexterity and mobility for the entire program. And now I have some lovely, sublime stitches going up the back of my pointer finger. On zoom, it may have looked as though I always had a question or something to add. Not so, or at least not always. I was just keeping the finger above my heart.
So, that happened, and that is why I made the work I made this summer, along with all the other important philosophical and logistical reasons.
Random Images of Concept and Process
Since they actually the Same.
