Kirsten Ullrich | Artist Statement

In my investigations I allow subject matter to be dictated by impulse. The work acts as a record of my free associations; as a result, pieces often track a chain of short-range logic from element to element, but as wholes read as absurdities or impossibilities. As author I am able to retrace the mental steps that lead to a piece’s final state, but to a viewer the stack up of images and material that forms that piece is opaque and functions as an analogy of someone else’s thought process. While the work may appear to follow the tradition of surrealism, I deliberately eschew the pretense of plumbing the unconscious. My work is instead a fully conscious and mischievous combining of and monkeying with images that take on personal significance.

A sense of play is obvious in the subject matter, but the play itself has an integral function in directing the development of imagery. When moving from exploratory drawings to painting, the transition in scale and material leads to changes in the way images function and ultimately alters what they are. I follow cues given by the interaction of subject matter and materiality, plus any unexpected suggestions the work itself may offer, running with ideas as they are sparked. Spontaneous elements coexist with more considered passages to create friction inside the picture plane; materially as well, paint as itself ends up defining the space of the picture with as much credibility as more traditionally developed imagery. This aggregation, whether subtly disjunctive or more obviously so, prevents the image from cohering too easily as an alternate reality even as an allusion to that structure is made. As a result, the work presents the viewer with an uneasy sense of the continual modification, fluidity, or arbitrariness that is key to the making of a painting, both inviting and repulsing entrance.

Sculpture works in tandem with the paintings but functions very differently. As work grounded in reality, the 3D pieces operate as absurdities as opposed to impossibilities; they take the conflicts and ambiguities recorded by the paintings and convert them into objects that are unavoidably present, unsubtle, and thus ridiculous. In effect, the sculptures function as non sequiturs come to life.