In Person: Collage Photograph Ink Blood Poetry: A Presentation of Concealed Moments
‘In Person’ is visceral, disturbing, and purposefully provocative. The words and imagery are laden with life narrative. The world as it is experienced, interpreted and recorded in collage, photographs, words, paint and menstrual blood. The poems and images are documents and records of an action and a time in life. Art as a conduit for a ‘something’ and adding a human experience. Art, as a ‘life force’ put into an order, structure, system, or form and then breaking the orderliness into orchestrated abstractions.
The ‘taking of’ a photograph, capturing a time in life. The performance and action of the one who holds the camera for the ‘taking of’. The performance of the figures within the scene, frozen in film. Captured for a split second, a face, a gesture, a view with a camera to recreate the moment and the presence of someone or something. Art has its own presence. Defining presence; the actuality of presence defines presence in the actual experience. Presence in a performance work, there are two possible extremes; the self as the instinctive and primitive animal with a presence that reacts with fight or flight and the passion of spontaneous and improvised responses. And there is the consciously considered and pragmatic self with instinctive and intuitive rehearsed and prepared interactions and actions. These two places are poles apart, and are on the same spectrum, held in equal importance. The raw, exciting, and passionate instinct interacts with the thoughtful, composed and formulaic. Between these two points of human and animal, focusing on the connection between these two states of being, a tension of the wild and unfettered beast pulling with and against the considered and rehearsed human in the performance. The energy or life force is regurgitated and reused in the performance, painting, photograph. The photograph depicts the wild and the tame. Photographs capture a split-second moment of life. The collaged photographs are embellished with poems and paintings giving the flat printed surface a depth of added emotion and passion.
“We value some artists for what they produce, and some artists for who they are. Pauline Amos commands both. Whatever she does, and in whatever form, is always fearless, emotionally exposed, direct and without so much as a glance to see what a critic, a funding body or a prize committee might be thinking. If real Art is work rather than works, then she’s a true Art-worker.”
Brian Morton, (Scottish) author and broadcaster.
