casa adnew -

Malaga

Mixed media artist

Birgit Gerritsen

Coín

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spain

My DREAMSCAPES are shaped by dreams, thoughts and the visual information fired at us every day through all kinds of media.

I create these DREAMSCAPES in my ‘visual diary’, on large sheets of paper or on canvas, using mixed media: collage technique, painting and drawing with soft pastel. Textures, structures and layers emerge; it is an organic process. The landscapes grow through layers of images, shapes and structures taken from the visual material I come across in various media. I use photographs of film and television stills, pictures and texts from magazines and newspapers, but also plastic waste and organic material that I find.

As a visually oriented person I am both stimulated and overstimulated by visual pollution, and I feel the need to process this bulk of visual information and found materials, to transform it and translate it into a virtual landscape.

Textures, structures and layers emerge; it is an organic process.

In my earlier work (WONDERLAND) figures played the leading role, but more and more the collages take the form of landscapes that become increasingly abstract; the figures recede into the background, merge into larger shapes, and those shapes fuse with one another. The visual information is like leaves drifting down and composting into earth from which new life grows, as in nature.

The layering is like the layering of experiences, of an ‘emotional landscape’. It is a personal, logical and natural process — a voyage of discovery, experimenting with shapes, materials and techniques, in which the making and the story I want to tell reinforce one another.

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