Artist Statement

Miles Lauterwasser uses printmaking, primarily woodcut and etching, and installation. He is interested in cyclical states of change in relation to environment and the self. These themes are explored in evocative, dissonant work that requires resolution on the part of the viewer.

 

He is interested in records of passing time, and in how the mechanisms we use to document and measure its passing affect our perception of environment. Imagery is developed using photography, projection, scanning and laser cutting, processes that are used in combination. The points of exchange between these processes highlight different qualities and permeate the language of one with the next. At these moments artifacts in the process are fused, the memory of a place reconstructed in the image as breccia.

 

Sequence is used to examine how the physical environment intertwines and assimilates with memory and the unconscious mind. By exploring and contrasting conventions of cyclical and linear time the tradition of ‘beginning, middle and end’ is challenged. Time based techniques such as sequential photography or the scanning motion of a flatbed scanner is looped, restructured and built upon.

 

Image plays an important role in both two dimensional and three dimensional work. Curious perspectives and dissonant surfaces provides a framework for environments that subvert conventional space. Ephemeral elements appear in isolation, as if held out of time or coming into being before the viewers eyes. Obvious narrative is obscured and is replaced by a liminal space in which the viewer is asked to fill in fragmented parts with their own mental debris, informed by personal experience. These spaces reflect the nonlinear structures of the unconscious mind in which free form associations are made using fragmented elements, guided by a hidden hierarchy.

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Tidal bodies of water recur as image as well as structurally in three-dimensional work. These are places in which states of change are precipitated by vast cosmological forces, where events on a cosmic scale are represented in the gradual transformation of environment. Another point of exchange in which the minute can become massive and the massive minute.

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"Unconsciousness always manifests itself when conscious or rational knowledge has reached its limits and mystery sets in, for man tends to fill the inexplicable and mysterious with the contents of his unconscious. He projects them, as it were, into a dark, empty vessel.”

Carl Jung, Man and his Symbols.