Rebecca Armstrong

Making art, like loving, is what humans do at our most human. As such, it is by nature anti-capitalist, anti-exploitation, hopeful, exploratory, and rare. I hope in my work, and my mind, to carve out a place for human experience and its detritus: for touching, for witnessing, for knowing the world in our own ways. I quest for balance between the mind and the hand, hermeticism and revelation. We live, if we are willing to, in a world of excruciating beauty, beauty so painful that we are hardly able to notice. I wrote, as a note to myself, that the goal of work is “to transcend/ into the most horribly graphic/ beauty” this way taking account of both horror and joy. This is the bullseye of my target: the jolt of these two in unison, however quiet it comes. The current work centers around the failure of the body, the boundaries where harm is unavoidable and inarticulable. Frailty is expressed by surrogates: furniture, animals, images, language, plants. Everything striving, everything on the edge of collapse or dissolution.

In practice there are two impetuses, external and internal. In some works I ritualize my daily experience. In others I attempt to bring the internal towards the surface, to bring what I see with the inner eye to the outer world.