IDA MITRANI ART
Amalgam of Linear Conceptions
Mixed media drawing on paper (watercolour, pencil, pen and ink), collage, digital images, plastic and paper cut-outs, synthetic mesh netting, mixed media plastic sculptures, wire, organic life forms.
Drawing Connections
(Group Exhibition)
October- November 2022 - Lord Mayor's Pavillion, Fitzgerald's Park, Cork.
'A collaboration between Drawbridge and Sample-Studios - an exhibition and research project which explores drawing practice, experimental approaches, and begins by responding to drawings held within the Crawford Art Gallery drawing collection'
https://crawford.cit.ie/drawbridge-sample-studios/
https://sample-studios.com/exhibitions/drawing-connections/
Amalgam of Linear Conceptions, mixed-media installations
The site-specific mixed-media drawing and 3D installation I exhibited is a response to the surroundings and architecture of the Lord Mayor's Pavilion, and to Woods Near Albury & Tring, Herts, 1810, by English artist and satirist Thomas Rowlandson.
Rowlandson’s watercolour and ink drawing is an observational study illustrating a mixed woodland and parkland designed between the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
The positioning of the artwork allows the viewer to become part of a controlled landscape within the gallery context in which the various plants growing on Fitzgerald Park’s grounds are depicted in an unconventional way, pushing the boundaries of drawing.
The more traditional approach found in Rowlandson’ s watercolour and ink drawing - where the pale washes, the near perfect repetitive and vigorous curved lines suggesting the idealisation of an untamed landscape occupied by well arranged vegetation - is used as a starting point to construct the work and to create a continuity and connection between the various media and materials.
The layering and distortion of lines, forms, and colours through the continual process of repetitively printing, scanning, and manipulating digital images symbolises plant and human biorhythm, and the notion of reproduction through the use of technology.
The collage of the digitised images entangled with plant-shaped plastics evokes the notion of biological mimicry in which organisms simultaneously evolve to resemble and compete with one another.
While the work questions the relationship between humans and their ‘natural’ environment, and exposes our role in the current ecological crisis, by its placement it also encourages the viewer to stop, observe, and examine more closely.