“We talk far too much. We should talk less and draw more. I personally should like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic Nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches. That fig tree, this little snake, the cocoon on my window sill quietly awaiting its future – all these are momentous signatures.” (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) I have always believed in drawing as the perfect basis for any work I have envisaged. Often, the foundations and research aspect of drawing has taken me to in-depth, conclusive solutions of work I had not imagined. Opened doorways, where I thought it could not take me, surprised by my own outcomes. Drawing, whether it be documentative photography, graphite sketches or mapping for me, is a playful medium in which reading and manipulation is key. Photography has taken me to new places lately and I enjoy its readily available nature; the fast paced speed at which one's ideas can be quickly jotted down in a digital image. I am dabbling in fashion and product photography also. Drawing upon personal schematic ideas around humanity, socio-political ideas and macro/micro everyday universes – I am always in awe of ideas related to society and people. The human and its mind are always in my thoughts when producing work. In recent years, I have explored ideas about Identity through makeup wipes, the NZ Anti-Smacking Bill of 2007, acrylic paint as a domestic material in object form to skin, to relationships in families and environmental issues rejecting claims of New Zealand’s ‘Greenness’. Lately, I have been interested in another issue in which the personal becomes the political. My response to Danish liberalism versus Kiwi Prudishness has fascinated me since I arrived in New Zealand. To have one’s conditioned set of knowledge and psychological awareness thrown into change is very interesting to me. Entering puberty in this country seemed daring, alien and insecure for many of my peers. Yet as children we showered with the same sex in changing rooms, never once considering the rights of ‘wrong-doing’. In my work, the ephemeral plasticity of pop culture is explored through new mediums of vinyl cut, digital photography, spray paint and acrylic paint to mimic the fakeness of human representations as they sometimes are today. Amalie Termannsen, 2010 |