TAKING FLIGHT/ FLIGHT SCHOOL
Artist statement
Claudia Aziza Gibson-Hunter
May 2022
This page combines two different bodies of work:
TAKING FLIGHT and FLIGHT SCHOOL 2022 has been a year of thinking,
reading, discussing the idea of the collective spirit and tits
relationship to flight. This work is inspired by the folktales
of enslaved people taking flight from bondage, murmuration, and
the belief that the spirit force cannot be destroyed. In murmuration,
starlings have no leader, THEY KNOW how to position themselves
in the graceful communal patterns. I see these pieces as a call
to hope, ancestral memory, and creativity in these most challenging
times.
For these flight pieces, gathering was
a starting point. Gathering is the identification and collection
of materials (in this case papers), and objects that can be arranged
in a way that can express ideas of movement, agency, and time.
When combining painting, printmaking, papermaking, and collage
I make use of improvisation. The fast-paced decisions of which
color, texture, form, pattern, placement rely on improvisation.
Pieces are then left be refined or reconsidered after a day or
two. Jazz is a process here, and I am quick to indicate that improvisation
is primed by practice and skill.
The TAKING FLIGHT series and the FLIGHT SCHOOL are
in relief. Sheets of handmade paper were painted with mediums
that create various finishes. When the paper is made by hand it
was allowed to dry uneven and curling to create flowing forms.
Commercial sheets of paper were printed with layers of paint,
and block printing. Entire paintings, and pulp paintings, were
created then sliced, repositioned, edited, and interwoven with
the stiff and curled handmade paper. This work references the
patchwork quilting of Africans in the Diaspora, the fractured,
bold forms, and colors of Africobra through the juxtaposition
of colors, patterns, textures, rhythms, and forms.
My love of the deckled edges of paper, can be seen
in the compositions. The forms jutting at obtuse angles, paint
and paper reaching, pushing, extending beyond perimeters are my
call for agency, Uhuru, ...something else. The exploration of
Blackstraction continues to push my work into the realm of three
dimensionality.
I am a mixed media artist that understands collage
to be a ritual reflecting characteristics of the 21st century.
The use of sampling in music making, the sharing of Internet information,
the ferocious cross -cutting techniques used in contemporary film
media, dances that change tempos in a flash
. I know these
things as extensions of collage. While living at the convergence
of climate change, global pandemic, unfettered racism, and economic
upheaval, I find myself in times of confusion, courage, ignorance,
remarkable feats humanity and dispirited unconstrained greed,
I am sharing a lift for the spirit. This work is a call to gather
and a call for movement to, by, of something beyond todays
rhetoric.
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