Roslynne Norrod: capstone

Abstract

The artist's statement: Liminal. The concept of liminality has enraptured me since I first came to CSU. I work with the concept of liminality and where it resides, where it blurs the edge of memory, when it tilts things slightly off kilter, and who can see it. My focus is on how liminality specifically exists within intimate spaces such as the home, the mind, and one's self. Everything about liminality is intentional, color and texture being most so. Color is exactly planned within my pieces, being the central orientating factor used to determine whether a piece exists in the "dreamspace", which is characterized by vibrancy and high chroma pigmentation, or the "realspace", which has central themes of dullness, monochromacy, and an overall lack of saturation. Surrealism runs rampant among my work, and I take deep inspiration from artists such as Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Yves Tanguy, and Santiago Caruso. The home is a liminal space. No matter how much someone refuses to admit it, the home is an area which exists in the borderland between emotional turmoil and identity. Whenever I think about home I think about the fragility of being the more invisible member, even when outwardly one is the most exuberant. However, being the middle child within a triplet plus one dynamic means someone is going to fall through the cracks. People will be overlooked, silence will follow one member of the family, doors will stay closed sometimes. There is a certain beauty in this silence, in this level of quiet isolation. It isn't malicious, it isn't on purpose. It simply is, and thus it becomes evermore poignant to the personality development of the family member afflicted. My work relishes in this and works to capture emotions, conscious or unconscious, from their most minute expression to the most exuberant. From a bug to death, all of these exist within the walls of a home. Things begin to fragment and within my work I am trying to demarcate exactly how surreal this liminality is. Muted tones are used to represent the "awake" side of my work while the more fantastically coloured pieces represent the "dream" world of my work. This is because family dynamics impact information processing beyond when someone is awake, it creeps and seeps into their subconscious, super ego, and dream world. My dreams are incredibly muted, a stark contrast to the hyper-vividity of life for me. So I flip that colour palette when depicting emotions or capturing fragments of memory in my pieces. If you are unsettled, good. That is the intention. These pieces are not supposed to be unanimously palatable, one is supposed to be confused on some, disturbed by others, and a little protective over the last few. Welcome home and come inside this liminal home and make sure to wipe your feet.