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My practice is underlaid by an ongoing interest in how we make sense of the fluid phenomena of sensory data. I am intrigued by how, relying on abstractions, we illuminate what it is to be this person in this world.
I draw on three relatively simple components—cartoons, ornamental furniture and geometric abstraction—to construct objects and images with both symbolic and material significance, with abstract as well as physical weight and meaning. In my work the historical connotations and formal qualities of these components are made permeable and plastic. None of these components exists in pure form: they are intermingled to blur the formal as well as conceptual and abstract boundaries between elements. In this way, the works are like so much of what constitutes human thought, functioning as endlessly changing distinctions invented to facilitate imagination and to make sense of the world.
Inventing simplifications is necessary in the face of the overwhelming complexities of the world. Simplifying practices might involve implicating ‘boundary’ or ‘distinction’ as concepts essential to identity. And yet these simplifications are themselves fabrications, veiling the inevitable contingency of our being in the world, the blurring of boundaries between things we imagine as discrete in order to define and keep them in place. With loose lines my work explores what I understand as the animation demanded of edges, limits or boundaries to accommodate this contingency. Like the cartoon contours from which I take inspiration, my work illustrates and enacts identity as a shape-shifting inclination, exerting and retreating, belonging and rejecting, and it maintains the tension between such things while avoiding freezing them as dichotomies.
All influences are inadequate on their own but intriguing in that they force a problem of reconciliation. My manipulation of relatively simple fare, from cartoons to the forms of ornamental furniture and the language of geometric abstraction, is in itself a process of abstraction, a cartoon version, of human thinking and of our attempts to position ourselves in the world.
Paul Donald 2008