Domesticate Repatriate

Common ground

Arka Gallery, Vilnius Lithuania. City of Culture 2009.

In Common Ground, contemporary Scottish artists, Su Grierson and David Blyth combined to challenge perceived misconceptions surrounding domestic pattern, colour and the decorative by displacing it from its original design context.

Domesticate /Repatriate

Su Grierson

In this project the signage of nature, it’s abstracted and simplified pattern, is recombined with the photographic representations of the social and natural world in a series of computer altered images.

For centuries landscape and nature have been domesticated on the surfaces of textiles, ceramics and furnishings. Pattern contains history, each representing the ideals and ideas and techniques that were relevant at its own time of production but in these works they are re-fashioned into new and contemporary outcomes.

What is real? How much do the images that surround us in everyday life affect how we see and feel about the real world? To what extent do these images even register on our consciousness at all? Yet they undoubtedly do subliminally affect our understanding of the natural world.

Pattern, its simplicity and its essential essence, removes the mess of reality. It symbolically abstracts the basic form, but by reuniting that abstraction with images from the real world it can take on a different set of perceptions.

These works not only cross barriers between representational techniques but also bring together the distinct art disciplines of art & design. A merging or synthesis takes place, the borderlines are gone, a kind of in-between space arises. I am looking for the ‘immediacy’ of the image. The point at which it is first and foremost a visual experience, where some kind of understanding kicks in at the moment before thought – which is perhaps one interpretation of the sublime.

An additional series of photographic prints documents installations of printed materials repatriated to the natural environment.