Tracing Your Ghost II
After losing several loved ones to cancer in a short time, my art practice shifted to explore grief and the notion of the body as a wounded ecology. Engaging with nature gives us new ways to perceive death, providing a visual and material vernacular to express the fragility of our bodies, grief, and regeneration. This installation borrows language and processes from nature-tracing the line s of time, layering, cocooning, and shedding. The paper sculptures are compromised of layers of torn relief prints created from natural materials I collected while walking in the forest. The inky impressions of the tree stumps, bark and lichen are a vital record of my engagement with these organic materials made through printing, while at the same time being a document of natural matter in a state of decay. Much of my artwork aims at making visible the very tangible yet invisible space that death leaves in its wake. Creating these delicately hollow forms was a means to process and articulate grief while tending to the memories of those I'd lost. The installation is a type of animated memorial, inviting viewers to feel, to remember, and to acknowledge their own ghosts.
The Lichen Print Series
Collagraph prints of foraged lichen on rice paper. My process is rooted in engaging with the natural environment. Drawn to the varied forms and patterns of material I collected while spending time in nature - fragments of tree stumps, bark, and lichen, I was compelled to make prints of these things. I was curious to see what traces they would leave. It was in making the first relief prints - inking up the natural materials and rubbing my hand over the delicate paper, that I began to see an echo of the human body in the patterns and shapes that emerged. The veins of the lichen bloom like the lines of our circulatory system or expand in form reminiscent of lungs. The delicate impressions and patterns expressed through prints created with organic materials allow us to perceive our innate connection to the natural world and our part in its regenerative cycles of life and death.
After losing several loved ones to cancer in a short time, my art practice shifted to explore grief and the notion of the body as a wounded ecology. Engaging with nature gives us new ways to perceive death, providing a visual and material vernacular to express the fragility of our bodies, grief, and regeneration. This installation borrows language and processes from nature-tracing the line s of time, layering, cocooning, and shedding. The paper sculptures are compromised of layers of torn relief prints created from natural materials I collected while walking in the forest. The inky impressions of the tree stumps, bark and lichen are a vital record of my engagement with these organic materials made through printing, while at the same time being a document of natural matter in a state of decay. Much of my artwork aims at making visible the very tangible yet invisible space that death leaves in its wake. Creating these delicately hollow forms was a means to process and articulate grief while tending to the memories of those I'd lost. The installation is a type of animated memorial, inviting viewers to feel, to remember, and to acknowledge their own ghosts.
The Lichen Print Series
Collagraph prints of foraged lichen on rice paper. My process is rooted in engaging with the natural environment. Drawn to the varied forms and patterns of material I collected while spending time in nature - fragments of tree stumps, bark, and lichen, I was compelled to make prints of these things. I was curious to see what traces they would leave. It was in making the first relief prints - inking up the natural materials and rubbing my hand over the delicate paper, that I began to see an echo of the human body in the patterns and shapes that emerged. The veins of the lichen bloom like the lines of our circulatory system or expand in form reminiscent of lungs. The delicate impressions and patterns expressed through prints created with organic materials allow us to perceive our innate connection to the natural world and our part in its regenerative cycles of life and death.
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Amberlie Perkin Amberlie Perkin is an interdisciplinary artist and educator who explores the connections we share with our non-human kin and the natural world. Perkin's artwork highlights ways to understand and respond to death while examining how curious and embodied engagement with the natural environment can inform the complex and often abstract emotions of grief. Perkin's art practice enacts the materiality of mourning and metamorphosis, while exploring the regenerative potential of death to animate new growth in the natural world and our lives. Her installations call upon viewers to make connections to nature, inviting them to feel, remember and acknowledge their ghosts. |
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