Artwork Statement

My artwork is an exploration of psyche – being a visual documentation. There are many corridors of consciousness to tread, all being marked with our own personal symbology, although there seem to be similar structures that make the foundations of human consciousness. Hence the concept of collective psyche.

But the conscious mind, with its prejudices, has a tendency to screen out what it has been conditioned to dislike. Many archetypal images are now encrusted with the baggage of aeons and appear confusing.

The direction of my artwork is an abandonment of these images. My art is an abstraction of my experiences, or is it perhaps a more faithful reproduction?

Abstraction is to objectify an experience. Experiences only hold meaning once they have been assumed by the self and thus made subjective – relative to oneself. Hence any common language, be they sounds or images are, abstract. Abstraction is the universal exchange of communication.

The subjective reality of my artwork, is a je ne sais quoi, a de ja vu, a persistence of memory, that will strike me at the oddest of moments. It is the sensation that is familiar, and environment and situation that were until that moment familiar or real, but now unfamiliar or unreal. The moment is surreal.

It is in that moment that we experience illumination, or if it eludes us, a nightmare.

Leo Plaw