ADELE VALLANCE, Lincoln

Last Updated: 8 December 2009 1,207 views No Comment Posted by: B-Side Empire

Name: Adele Vallance

University: Lincoln University

Course: Fine Art

“My work is about the forgotten, the left behind. Using the given history, context and how the past resurfaces in the present as starting points, I physically interrogate the surface revealing the poetics of specific sites or objects, adding my own brittle traces in the process. I am a collector of what is infinitely collectible, the stuff of human passage, the debris of humanity, our dent in time.

Driven by the ideas of preservation and echoing what was, my work is similar to Catherine Bertola’s collection of dust, and the process of turning it into something beautiful, but leaving it in its original form. Taking a slightly predatory approach I work with ordinary materials and objects, preserving both matter and surfaces deemed to be a mess or simply over looked. A true representation of the object or space is displayed; but through the gallery placement of the work, suddenly the beauty of the marks are highlighted, the private manual labour involved adding importance to the marks.

The process is like taking finger prints we are left with a residue, a reminder and a space of isolation between presence and absence. The memory of the object slipping in and out of the experience of the work, similar to the visual connections Rachel Whiteread’s casts have to their original objects.

Appearing as a skin of the object it once was, the PVA table top from my art studio acts as a memento of this part of my life. The spot lighting adds to the eerie aesthetics of the lifeless relic suspended in a darkened room. The fragility and vulnerability of the work reminds me of my ever shortening time here at university and on this earth, thus encouraging the viewer to consider their own lives.”

The drawings are consistent in their correlation between the observed and the imagined. The outcome of this correlation reveals a scene that is absurd without being alien, leaving an accessible image.”