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Angela Eames – Cycle
The Digital U is excited to start this year’s Extreme Views Pt.2 programme with work from artist Angela Eames. In a video series generically entitled Cycle, Eames in her own word’s invites the viewer “to reflect upon unmaking and making, past/present and future and back and/to front.”
Each of her videos probes into the natural cycles or loops of life via different material elements – a window on our world; birth and decay, fracture and growth and time in an unceasing rotation of night and day. Eames’s visual aesthetic within each piece reflects the dark nature of the human hand and/or mind, creating apocalyptic visions – our blue Earth rendered to down to nothingness. She is speaking directly to us, of our species’ inability to step away from individual needs, and our lack of objective initiative in the face of the calamitous circumstances that we initiated. While we are the makers of our own doom, the reality of nature and the flow of time is that nothing is forever. We may not survive but the planet will… Eames captures this downward spiral in an enticing aesthetic, which grips the viewer.
Simultaneously, Eames’s work reflects the beauty of the human hand and our voyage to attain the sublime – highlighting that we are in the end the masters of our own success. As quickly as humanity is unmaking our blue planet, so is the opposite of this scenario true.
Angela Eames’s Cycles is the first of 6 online Digital U exhibitions exploring environmental collisions.
“These particular video works provide for me a different kind of working space. As a drawer, I see a timeline as a continuously evolving time-based piece of paper… I can’t get behind it but I can to some extent see through it! Marks can come and go as with graphite and eraser but in this space-time, membranes or layers of visual information can sequentially reveal or obscure previous membranes. Hovering somewhere between opacity and transparency, between still and moving or between recall and prescience, the works remind us of the fragility and irrevocability of biological balance, our dependency on this balance and the principle of self-regulation.”
Angela Eames
CONSEQUENCE
“Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop.”
– Haruki Murakami
LAST BREATH
“…a painted ship upon a painted ocean.”
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
RENASCENCE
“The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.”
-Leonardo Da Vinci.
CONTINUUM
In the midst of the greatest technological revolution that Homo sapiens has experienced, we face a dilemma. Appropriately used, these technologies can bring us incalculable benefits. Inappropriately used, they can destroy our cognitive and critical autonomy. The choice of how to manage this is ours.
– Angela Eames
Angela Eames Bio
Eames studied at Johannesburg School of Art, Farnham School of Art, Bath Academy of Art and the Slade School of Art. In 1991 she completed a Masters in Computing in Art and Design at Middlesex University under the tutelage of John Lansdowne. As an artist whose practice has continuously involved the exploration of drawing in direct relation to technology, she received her Doctorate through Wimbledon School of Art and the University of Surrey in 2000. (Thesis – Extending drawing: a creative enquiry into innovatory approaches to drawing as visual thinking and the realisation of material and virtual outcomes.)
She uses raw data in the form of previous and current drawings/photographs, the web and planetary science archives and processes it, creating new scapes. She builds, composites and optimises her images, to produce unfamiliar images or landscapes. Her work is best defined by its intense but delicate craftsmanship and by the transformation of the commonplace into works of art. Eames contradicts the generic and mass-produced with something essentially handmade, generating a dialogue between modernity and history, observation and fabrication, nature and urbanity and the relationship between process and idea.