Digital Art Museum
 
Sue GOLLIFER    
 

Biography

Artist's statement

This is an archive of the Digital Art Museum for historical reference.
See dam.org for the current site.

   

My work has developed in the last twenty years according to a rigorous programme of formal experiment, through which sets of relationships evolved between shapes, colours and tones. At first these relationships were concerned only with the surface of the work: illusions of depth or movement were made explicit as illusions, by using a systematic grid arrangement, and maintaining the symmetry of the overall design. Later, perspective was incorporated into the work, so that the arrangement could be read as a depiction of a space with depth, although never as a 'scene ': the space depicted exists solely in the work.

More recent prints are designed to raise questions about the surface itself. The prints are made of paper, coloured. If anything is represented on them it is coloured paper, with folds, angles and creases suggested, but at the same time contradicted by the arrangement of colours, lines, and tones. The intention, as always, is to provide an arena in which the eye can be stimulated and pleased, while the mind can exercise its right to pursue or to reject the illusions offered or withheld.

Each print is of course a complete image, but when viewed in groups, or as a series, the prints can be seen as stages in a continuously process of transformation, from point to point, constantly polymorphic process, whose identity is maintained by my preference of tonal, chromatic and formal combinations.

Although much of my work is still concerned with the traditional media of printmaking, I have become increasingly involved with new reprographic technology, using computer-generated imagery and innovative reproductive techniques, such as laser-based scanning and printing. These assist me to discover creative and surprising solutions to problems. The memory and speed and the vast network of options allow new thought processes to be explored and discarded painlessly as the ideas take shape, develop and germinate.

One attraction of this new technology, of course, is the convenience: calculations which once occupied hours, and involved painstaking measurement with ruler and compass can be completed with greater accuracy in seconds, leaving more time for the purely human judgments which remain fundamental to art. Another, as I have suggested above, is the possibility of creative error: a step taken with uncertainty can result in chaos, in which case it can be quickly unmade; or, more rarely, it can produce or suggest an order unforeseen in its complexity. In these cases the device is incorporated into the repertoire of available options, and the process of refinement and discovery continues.

Perhaps even more significant is the possibility offered of detaching the images, or the relationships which determine the images, from their material base. Although ultimately all experience of art derives from the perceptions of artist or viewer in the context of material sensations, computer technology enables the sources of these sensations to be temporarily encoded as streams of digits. In this form they can be modified in scale, directed into a wide range of printing or reproductive media, or almost instantly transmitted over vast distances. In these ways, the specific material form of the image can be made less obsessive. The transaction between artist and viewer becomes less that of a negotiable object, more that of a dialogue about perception. When I started to make prints, I was motivated by precisely that possibility: its renewal through new technology continues to motivate my work.