Lorraine Pritchard Headbones Commentary

The Drawers - Lorraine Pritchard Commentary written by Julie Oakes

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Results of the headhunt

With a vague appropriation that has more to do with invention than extraction, Lorraine Pritchard's dedication to passing life through the sieve of fine arts results in oxymoronic glibness. With an ability to deal with a breadth of topics, the excitement of her original creative instinct animates life-at-hand. Lorraine takes found objects, crusty with the vestiges of time and reclaims them with a freedom that reveals a liberated consciousness. She draws upon everything, looking, processing and working with a range of materials that support a lovely regenerative cycle of existence.

Lorraine Pritchard has generated her images by going on a creative journey. The route is not clear but the destination, the work of art, is a positive place. The paper grows in stature after each application, the successive additions bringing about a balance between the light surface and the intrusion of marks upon its virgin blankness. The subject matter, in this case heads, is made easier than they were when they existed as fuller corporeal heads. They are airier, not tied so firmly to the excuses that physicality makes to keep at bay a visitation of flightiness. Responsible to the page, to the pencil or watercolor, but not held in check by the translation from ideas to signification, Lorraine Pritchard's drawings bring to mind release. There is the evidence of good intention in these sensitive, witty revelations. With an economy of energetic lines, like nerves bouncing impulse from the paper to an aura, Pritchard has created sustained seminal assurances that there are ties between myriad objects and fine arts.

The sculptural heads embody much the same lightness. They are playful combinations of materials and common objects that have lost the semblance of their original usage and been ennobled with a sentient semblance. It is, once again, an extraction of weight through the change from common purpose to a successful isomorphism. The dissimilar ancestry of the elements have a second chance to prove themselves as worthy of existing once they have converged in the sculptures. Cement, a building material with inherently unrefined potential to define, makes a quantum leap to animation when, for instance, the trowels stop being used to spread and instead become eyes. A spark of life stirs as the cement solidifies. A new tribal hierarchy of protectors is born from a totemic gathering of spare parts, discarded remnants of renovations and garden tools.