Catherine Blydenstein
MA Fine Art
My practise is situated between printmaking and painting.
Through my making I’m questioning certainty.
I’ve been looking through a lens of uncertainty, challenged to do so through changing personal circumstances, and shifting world orders. What is stable or unstable? What is solid or in flux?
I explore polarities, the tension between contrasting forces or states: such as order and chaos, fragility and resilience.
The methods I employ reflect my interest in working between digital and analogue (or handmade) processes.
For my Masters Project I made ‘inkblot’ drawings, after Rorschach the Swiss psychologist working mainly early C20, who invented the ink blot test as a therapeutic tool.
This method evolved from an interest I’ve had in spills, stains and incidental marks, often by-products of artistic process, chance outcomes.
Relating to the Rorschach test, the imagery I developed could represent internal landscapes, mirrored realities, not fully understood. This dialogue between analogue and digital processes that the work has emerged from might be a comment on our lives being increasingly organised, filtered and expressed through digital matrices.
I’ve made several different pieces for my masters that stem from a desire to create and conduct images through a range of processes, to see how they persist and become altered or reconfigured.
There is an exertion of pressure inherent in this that reminds me of the pressures we experience in our personal lives and in our external environments, which are both physical and psychological, the push and pull of life.
