MY QUOTE. Now I'm a real artist.

“Dare to cross the bridge that holds apart and brings together the realms of dream and reality” – Daniela Tamman 2012

Rose Skinner's Fantastical Installations - Imaginapolis

IMAGE FROM ROSE SKINNER INSTALLATION: LLAMALAND





My interview with the artist for my thesis:

INTERVIEW WITH ROSE SKINNER
QUESTIONS TO THE ARTIST

1) What is the intention of the spaces you create in your installations?

I’m bored with living in the urban environment. I question why form and function has become more important than our ability to connect with the spaces around us. Why creativity, wonder and play are being designed out of our experiences. Why liability and profit trump experience. I question the implications of living in a world designed by these factors by creating nonsensical escapist environments base purely on the sensory experience.

For me escapism is an intriguing topic within contemporary society. Multifarious socially expectable forms of escapism are deeply rooted into our contemporary way of living so much so that escapist ideologies have become a lucrative commodity, package ingeniously into our everyday lives. My installations are a child-like wanderlust to escape the urban environment; to sink with-in a self-created fantastical world which turns the everyday banal into a candy flavoured psychedelic adventure; a place where things aren’t logical and sense doesn’t need to be sought.

2) Would you say that they are an expression, a realisation, or a simulation of the landscape of the imagination? (or if not how might they relate to imagination for you)

Could I say a manifestation of the imagination?

The imagination doesn’t always make sense. Well, mine doesn’t. It’s a surreal mind-trip, a complex web of conscious and sub-conscious desires and fears that influence the way I think and live my life. Imagining and dreaming are a fluid non-committed way for me to explore artistic concepts and scenarios before manifesting them into reality.

My works are essential an exploration into the unconscious. Imaginopolis in particular was an experiment in creative visualization using the naff technique discussed in new age philosophies such as: The Secret, What The Bleep Do We Know an Creative Visualization?

3) Is the outsider's 'experience' of the installation important to the intention/effect of the work, and is the work meant to be experienced as something separate than their 'reality'?

The audience completes the work. Or to be more accurate, the audience’s experience of the work is the work of art. Viewing pictures or watching a video of the installations never really equate to walking into the environments and being immersed in a cacophony of sounds, smells, tastes, colours and intervening interactions that make up the worlds.

My intention is to create an alternate reality, something that steps outside of the everyday experience but the individuals perception of the space is the real reality and the constructed environment is the means to that unique perspective. . does that make sense?

4) How do you want (if at all) the viewer to relate to the worlds you create?

I would like the audience to find their own relation to the environments. The eclectic and intricate nature of the works and the use of everyday materials allows for broad interpretations.

5) Do you use juxtaposition? (i.e. of negative/positive elements or dream/reality structures)

Juxtapositions aren’t something I construct into my work but it inevitably happens. One end of the spectrum gives the other a psychological context.



Good luck with your studies.

Best,
Rose

Ephemeral

a few experiments from dreams project

more from bedtime photoshoot in august

Snow

The snow is silent.
Beyond my window, the world stretches out
In white – a landscape that no one
Has touched.
And in the night,
There is a peace
Of the quiet that muffles all awe
An unfurling veil of pale mist and shadow
Like a soft carpet of smoke unfurling into the distance
Meandering the trees,
And the world is half-buried beneath it.
And all is eerily still.
The wind moves nothing as if
Careful
That even the slightest breath
Might disturb the downy calm that settled
Or perhaps swirl the drifting snowflakes
In their slow spiraling fall, gently
From a cloudless sky.
My garden is painted white
A porcelain orchard of branches and trees
Leaves frosted like pale bells
That seem to want to tinkle like glass
If any whisper could stir them at all
From their frozen arrangement.

If I could wander without reserve
The solace of this un-treaded world
Where not a footstep
Dares to leave its mark
Not a sound can trouble
It’s silence.
As elsewhere, people snuggle inside
in the warmth,
Leaving this wintery
Wonderland
For me.
Here I might belong.

Rain go away

The calm after the storm
Is only calm besides the rage
That swelled the sea to violence.
In the night that settles
But does not rest
So many things have been lost.
And what is found is an absence
A wound, an abscess
A hole in the ground
Whose deep, dark hollow
Is filled with Nothing,
Unlike anything - so thick
And deep, and heavy and solid -
You can feel its silent empty
Presence in the air
Clinging to your bones
Like the ghost of something
Not even there
But it's silence, its stillness
Is as loud and clear
As the thunder that swore that
The storm
Was here.

Oh how it rained, and poured.
As if the sky had some frustration
Swelling deep in its chest of clouds -
An agonised torment it could not express
Darkening the pretty sur-face of sky.
And when the sun could bear to look no more
It withdrew and blinded its eye.
The fog of mist rolling through
Like a chariot pulling a train of clouded thoughts
Roiling and swilling the atmosphere -
Stirring the sea to disarray
And the titans inside her clashed and fought
For the sake of single clarity
To brush the tension away.
How the sky spilled and wrought
Tears like a weeping vein -
Struck by the slap
Of the best intentions
That threw all the chance in the fray.
And how the storm seemed
To struggle against its own swiping strength
In a wind that howled in pain -
Like a beast, a monster
Bowed down and broken before itself
Unleashing the outbreak of a world suppressed
And contained in its head.

How the water is so still
It seems
And the murky darkness
Like ink swirling
Sinking beneath
Never to be seen again, so hoped.
But like a smile
That hides it's teeth
A dangerous shadow
that hides in the light.
Returning within
Itself again
With no more
And no less
of a blight.
But harder
And darker
And less trusting -
Less open

The mouth of the tempest
Is shy.
How to express
The torment and stress
Of the weather
That lives under the skin
Of the sky.
We put up our shelters
We put up our tents
We shield ourselves from the rain
We shut our windows, and close
Our doors -
And hear only the sound of it drip-drip away
Only the lightening that cracks
On the frame
Only the crackle of our warm
Fireplace.
The wind is so lonely
It calls out in vain
The rain in its motion
Is trying to say
The lightening that tries
To connect to the world
So lost, and disjointed
So misunderstood.

Withdraw to the clouds
And never return
For the more that you try
That more that you'll burn
The very last bridge
To cinders and ash
So take one step back
And know
You were never ever
Made to pass.