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.
Copyright © 2006, Headbones Gallery, The Drawers
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