Marsha Cottrell is an American artist who currently has a solo exhibition at Petra Rinck Galerie in Düsseldorf.
You graduated
from your Masters in 1990. Are you still exploring the same ideas you were
interested in when you were studying?
When I was in school I was painting and drawing
the landscape in a fairly traditional manner from life. I was also looking at
odd bits of still-life material and painting them, which resulted in images
that looked like they could be landscapes. Toward the end of graduate school I
was inventing landscape-like images from my imagination, and the impulse to do
that has continued to the present. Over years of working, and in the last
fourteen with the computer, the conception of space has become more abstract,
and the terrain more uncertain.
IMPOSSIBLE NIGHT 2011, 62,4 x 97,9 cm Iron oxide on mulberry paper |
Your
landscapes are energetic, wild and lyrical mapped worlds and alternate
universes. What does landscape mean to you?
These words are good. The first landscape images
in art I connected with as a young person were da Vinci’s “deluge” drawings. I
was attracted to the idea that they were not representations of actual places,
but eternal/internal landscapes that might be found anywhere at any moment in
time. Their energy, architecture, and intricacy—but not rigidity—always
appealed to me. They seemed to present an open platform with which to interact,
and I’ve always aspired for my own work operate in a similar way. I want people
to be able to relate—to be able to respond on an immediate level—whether they
have much experience with art or not.
There is an inherent rigidity to the platform of a
home/office computer, and it naturally insists that one be deliberate and
methodical. We all keep folders within folders within folders, and do things in
orderly, procedural steps. The sense of energy and movement in some of the
images I’m making results—in part—from my struggle to be improvisational (and
physical) within a space that isn’t naturally set up for that.
Your works on
paper look like intricate, obsessive and deliberate drawings. Can you tell us
about your process?
I began using the computer about 14 years ago, and
my interest in the subject of landscape went right along with it. With its
limited environment of chair, desk, etc., the computer seemed to provide a kind
of newfound freedom, despite the challenges of losing (for a time) a physical
relationship with my work. My current process is a hybrid of digital and
handmade. Inside the space of the computer I’m working with marks in much the
same way one would with more traditional processes, except that they are
manufactured and not inherently expressionistic. In the recent work, I
manipulate the image outside of the computer as well, and in this way am
forging a direct connection between human and machine elements.
This new body
of work brings forth a different sense to that which we are familiar with. What
do you feel are the main differences between the new body of work (white on
black background) as opposed to your more common known black on white
background?
I don’t really see them as all that different but
because of the dark field, the new drawings may have some new and immediate
connections for people. The night sky, for example, is dark and teeming with
bright marks, so one can enter into these new drawings from the standpoint of
that universal experience. The imagery in all of my work, however, is
simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. I’m still creating space with an
endless array of bits and lines culled from my library of digital debris.
The primary difference for me is that I’m making
the object myself now, and getting my hand back into the process in a direct
and physical way. Because of that, there is now an integration of manufactured
and handmade information in the drawings…so the object has the feeling of being
old and new (or futuristic) at the same time. I think these qualities lend
timelessness to the work and thereby invite a range of readings.
UNDER THE ILLUMINATING HYDROGEN 2012, 133 x 203,5 cm iron oxide on mulberry paper |
When did you
first know you wanted to be an artist?
My interest in making art has developed gradually
and consistently over time so I’m unable to identify a particular moment when I
decided to make it my life’s work. The first thing I ever thought I wanted to
be was a dancer, and perhaps evidence of that can be felt in some of the
drawings.
What are you
looking forward to within the next 12 months?
Spending time with my daughter and continuing to
work in the studio.
Marsha Cottrell
17 March – 5 May 2012
Ackerstrasse
199
40233 Düsseldorf
Germany
40233 Düsseldorf
Germany
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