Althia Blackman-Galibert - Artist
My Art...
When I embark on a visual journey, I never know where I am going but I’m always accompanied with a broken piece of plastic and paints to leave traces behind me along the way. I’m always impatient to get started and I’m always impatient to savour ‘the feeling’ after the trip!
On my journey, I often get lost, so by choice I go back to the point where I started and look on to the trace that I had previously left behind...
Sometimes I go back over my tracks embarking on a new journey over the first. Like trying to obliterate the memory of the wrong path I took.
Sometimes I look on with satisfaction, reminiscing of the journey laced with pleasure.
Sometimes I stay a while to gaze and to read what the trace urges me to understand.
Often, I am reminded of emotions from the journey too indefinable to have them materialised into words...like after giving birth...
...then I move on.
The force behind the gesture of leaving a trace is influenced by everything I have come into contact with that quietly results in sometimes inexpressible emotions lived and relived with the world around me.... as a backdrop!
A world once perfect in its creation is now made up of things we would like to change. Being merely human, we can’t reverse the changes, we alone have no Divine power, only God... but we have the power to express to others in ways that can at times, speak deeper than words. Some of us scrape, smear, etch, rub, inscribe, erase and overload with texture on a surface to express what comes from within: like putting back some of the beauty that we are progressively losing... about producing the absurd to quiver people’s attention, about reviving colours that are fading in people’s minds, about keeping what we see that will soon be gone, about rearranging what we see or interpreting what we imagine...
This is a little of what happens along my journey after having understood the traces left behind.
My journeys are made up of traces, these traces create paths.. and these paths make up an intricate map of ‘ME’. We all have maps... we all go on journeys, whatever form that may be. My journey is stained and smeared with colour and words... like yours, most probably. Only my paths are often messy, full of childish playing, difficult to decipher for some, yet easy for me to recognise.
Don’t try to understand who I am behind the smears of colour,
don't accept to merely 'like' or 'dislike' the image you see...search beyond the overall image and welcome what it offers you...
Bon voyage!
(don't forget to send me a 'postcard' I look forward to hearing from you and to reading your comments)