I have
started this project from a drawing done by one of my special needs student.
He is ethnically from the Southern Hemisphere. It is a drawing of his back
garden, in East London.
I found the drawing very beautiful and I felt that I could have done the drawing
myself in any moment of my own history. I asked him if I could copy it and
do a painting from it and that I was going to call it -“Deison’s
garden”. He smiled…
My attention was drawn to the fence itself and how he distorted it. The fence,
at first, is seen as a barrier, the borderline between his house and his neighbour
but his lines were deformed. For me, 'the fauts' appeared as spaces in the
imminence of doing something; they were quite active and gave me the sense
of openness.
The composition in the Border Line Project makes a reference to city plans,
allotments and the urban environments; the network that forms communities
and consequently, raise the problems of the different socio and cultural realities.
In this project, I am working with the idea of the hidden spaces in between
the particular cells, where, somehow, “one stops’ and the “other
starts”. The spaces can be generators of tensions that inhabit our private,
public and psychological experiences of a particular reality; as well as,
the socio-political and economic reality in the particular and universal notions
of culture and territory.
There is also a more direct reference to time and place by the usage of newspaper
cut outs for the drawing of the trees. The newspapers give us particular information.
They are an arrangement of data placed on a grid configuration of bare wooden
lines, which makes the final compositions on the same wooden support. The
cut outs of newspapers are of stories related to a historical imagery of the
relation between the west and east, which have been haunting us since the
early days of our civilization. Paradoxically, today, we still experience
the differences even though we claim that we live in a more developed, open
multicultural society. Can the line erase the differences?
The intention underneath in the making of the Project Border Line is to deconstruct
the barriers, frontiers; that signifies the differences; and transform this
infinite space, in a place where something can happen.
The bare lines that firstly separate the spaces reveal the use of the grid
as a symbol of utopia and social change. The paintings are revealing their
own structure, the support that holds the medium as the creator of the network
of information and imagery that would like to believe in the potential of
awareness and change.
