ARTIST STATEMENT
Tara Bursey
2008
During that entire year, I did not learn a simple sutra or read a book; instead I was busy day after day from morning until night with moral education, drill, military arts, factory work and training for compulsory evacuation. My nature, which already tended to be dreamy, became all the more so, and thanks to the war, ordinary life receded even farther from me. For us boys, war was like a dreamlike sort of experience lacking any real substance, something like an isolation ward in which one is cut off from the meaning of life.
-Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavillion
Beauty will be convulsive or not at all.
-Andre Breton, Nadja
My work employs the use of repetition to create dysfunctional objects. Through object-making, installation and two-dimensional work, I often explore the formal possibilies of repetition through the creation, destruction and re-creation of pattern, objects and systems. These works address a range of subjects, from obsessive-compulsive behaviors and body anxiety to workplace drudgery to meditiation and ritual.
An underlying interest in pattern as a result of repetition permeates much of my work. This interest is deeply rooted in textiles, and is fuelled by the satisfaction and certainty of pattern as well as the implications of broken or random pattern. In Shrimplace I-V, I took cues from the material parallels of dehydrated shrimp and lace doilies to create new objects which juxtapose pattern, order and symmetry with the ephemeral. In both Insecurity Blanket and the Signatures series, shredded office documents are re-assembled through the act of weaving to create new patterns of text. This cyclical process embraces both the order of a precise weave with the chaos of a random, surprise pattern.
Another major concern in my work is the relationship between repetition and anxiety, and the way anxiety manifests itself in repetative actions such as stutters, ticks, compulsive activity and ritualistic behaviour. Such activities, though often employed as defense mechanisms, have the potential to exhaust, age and distress. This idea has been explored in works which address the military's use of repetition to de-personalize soldiers (Formation, Head Count), and the use of repetition in everyday grooming and beauty rituals (8 Brushes, Compulsion Soap). Such works speak of the dichotomy of repetition to build and repetition to destroy. This idea is echoes in the process of making such works, in which an action is repeated until the mind becomes immune to outside thoughts and distractions.
ARTIST STATEMENT- Temple I, Temple II
Tara Bursey
April 2007
TEMPLE I and TEMPLE II are fibre works involving two modified dresses. Though appearing to be relatively normal from far away, both dresses actually have had all of their horizontally-running threads (save for very few) removed. Through the act of removing these threads, the dress is in fact only half a dress- destroyed and stripped of it's function yet remaining completely intact.
These works were inspired by the book The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima. The novel involves a young stuttering acolyte who becomes obsessed with the beauty of the Golden Temple where he is apprenticing to become a priest. Enraptured by the temple's perfection and filled with self-loathing, the acolyte sets the temple on fire in a desperate attempt to free himself from the bonds of the structures magnificence, which serves as a monument to his own imperfection.
The TEMPLE dresses relate the themes of Mishima's Temple of the Golden Pavilion- obsession and fetish, ritual and body image- to the contemporary female experience. The act of removing each horizontal thread by hand parallels repetitive (and often painful) beauty rituals such as plucking, waxing and hair-brushing. The intentional preservation of the vertical threads cheekily suggest the old adage about vertical stripes being slimming, while also evoking self-harm scars and long fair hair. The threads that have been removed from each dress have been saved in mason jars, alluding to ideas of control and preservation while referencing yet another form domestic ritual and "women's work."
The TEMPLE works attempt to address the universal quest for and obsession with beauty, and the often (self-) destructive nature of the process of "self-improvement."
ARTIST STATEMENT- Fidget August 2006
FIDGET is a work that fits into my ongoing investigation of repetition, and it's potential to depersonalize and desensitize within both institutions and domestic realms. It is comprised of several strands of hand-constructed worry beads, modelled after the traditional Greek worry beads ("Komboloi") used as a tool for relaxation and meditation.
Each of FIDGET's strands are made up of 19 hand-drilled pills, each on which four eyes- a common worry bead motif, said to protect the handler from the "evil eye"- have been hand-drawn. The act of making these strands- drilling, drawing, and stringing over and over again- parallels the many ways we employ repetition and ritual to desensitize; from the role of counting in both healing and meditation (counting sheep, counting to ten before reacting, counting a number of pills per day), to the ways in which anxiety can manifest itself in symptoms of psychiatric illness, such as repetitive/compulsive counting, writing (graphomania), fidgeting, touching, etc. The glaring eyes of FIDGET evoke a similar sense of anxiety, and allude to a perpetually awake state.
FIDGET addresses the role of repetition in both modern and folk methods of healing, and the ways in which we use repetitive acts to desensitize ourselves. It alludes to both the constructive and destructive implications of this instinct, issues of dependence, and the sometimes fine line between an illness and its cure.
