Scott Elk
Absence Metastructure - Pink and Orange, 2020
Oil on board
75cm x 38cm

This was my first real play with a thick pallet knife application of oil paint, hoping to capture the energy of the ring forms in my Absence Metastructure sculpture, but in a more abstract way, incorporating an element of chance and allowing the paint to do what it does best. The fleshy colours are a way of suggesting human form without it being figurative. This work and others I made at the time served as study pieces for a much larger work.

DETAIL:

Absence Metastructure

This Metastructure series is a precursor to my Desire Lines, and share many visual characteristics. My art I like to think of as a series or doors I walk through to get to the next artwork.

The series is about the moment of creation, the movement from concept to physical object. Its shapes come from within, the absence is the hole it leaves. 

Starting life as a project entitled ‘All The Places I’ve Lived’, 2020, I mapped the floor plan of each house I lived, then made them as panels I connected with wire. This was my first metastructure; a structure that describes another structure. I was intrigued by the concept in basic terms of events along a timeline, so I made the second metastructure in clay, and more abstract, as a series of hollowed out discs which represented loss. I then used the ceramic sculpture as the basis for loose observational paintings, as seen here in my painting which draws upon flesh tones to give the composition a human feel.