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Belinda HansonThe tape shapes twist and turn, their multifaceted surfaces glinting in the light. A cross between kinky and ethereal, they lend the space a new meaning. Extruding from the very arhitecture of the room, they grow and bubble to the floor, or swing from the ceiling. More fundamental than form, these pieces speak of processes that build form, the processes that life depends on: growth, budding, conjugation, extrusion, and decay.
My life has been the playground where my artistic interests took form, developed and matured. I was born on a farm in Minnesota and exposed to the fundamentals of life and death and the elements of water and sunlight. I grew up watching cattle birthed, milked and slaughtered. I watched trees leaf, bud, and fruit. I spent hours outside drawing in the dirt with sticks, building with leaves and fruit. My sister and I ran and played with the family dogs, as if part of their pack. I hold these memories close and they inhabit my work.
When a college student the subject I felt closest to was biology - and yet I didn't want to analyze the life I looked at. I wanted to admire it. My first degree in cellular and organismal biology affects the art I produce today. Peering through a microscope I watched cells divide and reproduce and learned about processes of energy production. The time and energy I spent studying science, far from wasted, informs my attitude towards art making. The tape shapes feel like self-portraits on a cellular level. The very experience of searching and studying and inventing - the scientific method itself - I have warped and molded into my art production ethic.
I approach my materials with an experimental attitude, drawing from the world around me in almost a Duchampian style. Rubber, tape, plaster, paper, latex, wax, anything that can be combined to extrude a visceral quality. I juxtapose materials widly. Soft and hard. Light and heavy. If it makes my skin tingle, it works.
The shapes themselves represent juxtapositions. They speak of internal organic structure and external organic structure, plant and animal, process and form. I build them to be a part of their space, morphing from the very walls that hold them.
The tape structures piece together slowly, smaller parts coming together to make larger forms, like weavings, women's work. I fit together the tape rectangles to form grids and then strucure these into hollowed vessels. Reminiscent of viscera: tubular, growing, budding and reproducing. Light glances off their rounded edges, as they sway in reaction to movement in the room, occasionally brushing against each other like people on an overcrowded bus. Sometimes I work with family and friends, handing me tape that I piece while we talk and share. This is a community event, unlike the art of privacy, building with materials alone in the studio. I balance these two kinds of art-making activities private and community, and enjoy the balance.
The tape is transparent. You can see a piece of the real world framed by the art itself, a kind of looking-out into a picture frame.
Visit her web site at www.BelindaHanson.net
Belinda's studio is located in Dunsmuir, CA 96025
Contact Belinda by email at theduck@snowcrest.net
