Marisa Purcell
Realm

ARTIST STATEMENT

When I paint it feels as though the verbal part of my brain goes quiet.
Its like the pre-frontal cortex wakes up.

What emerges always surprises me. The painting unfolds as I watch. One thing affects the other. Every element connects with the next like a spider web or a network of fungus linking an entire for-est. Like Einstein?s description of mass, everything is interdependent and co-dependent, every-thing is part of a system. Space curves. Every object sits in its own gravitational field, yet affects everything around it.

For me, the veil acts as a screen - mimicking the way the brain erects definitive boundaries to con-struct reality. It becomes a curtain and implies movement. I like how this movement makes the surface changeable - depending on the viewing position. Like a mirror the reflective pigments I use allow the painting to reflect multiple versions of itself.

My ongoing interest in veils, curtains, looms, shields, cosmology and liminal spaces continue to be investigated in these new paintings. The paintings create Realms of other possibilities, alternative zones - beyond realities we so carefully construct for ourselves. They reveal a space that sits just beyond me.

My paintings are a distillation of the endless possibilities available to me, condensed into one flat-tened surface. They are cross-sections of time and being. Painting is my way of filtering through the doppler effect of noise - and sit with the ubiquitous human desire to understand the unfathom-able vastness of it all.