Artist Spotlight: Audrey Anderson
Artist Statement:
With its seemingly automated ‘must-dos’, moments in the life of the everyday are almost forgettable; yet repetition creates a complex underlying story – narratives built up from shapes, patterns, identities, personalities and relationships. In utilising lines of ink and colour, Anderson’s work complicates daily narratives in a graphic-novel inspired manner. The act of drawing becomes a means to exploring interpersonal and emotional relationships, mixing different techniques to represent multiple narratives in a single work.
These narratives aren’t only the story of the characters painted and scenes described, but also the story of the viewer whom Anderson is at pains to include as an intricate part of the process. For example a group of taxi drivers are painted twice, firstly as participants in a scene, and then again in large washes over the scene as passive observers to their own presence in the painting, or as a suggestion of the actual artwork viewer. Acting as visual puzzle pieces, the overall effect cuts through the rich narratives of an event to overemphasize, and therefore etch in painful sensitivity and exaggeration, the banality of day-to-day life. This includes the moment of participating in and observing an event. In doing so, Anderson’s work is placed in an ambiguous position between control and accident, as mark that consciously delineates versus a sudden unexpected instant.
Incredible artworks by South African artist Audrey Anderson.
Audrey Anderson transforms real life moments into nostalgia using
graphic novel styled illustrations and its associated language of introspection.
Born in Sunnyside, Pretoria, Audrey Anderson now lives and works in Johannesburg
– with her current studio located at New ARC Studios, Newtown.
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