'Into The Abstract' 8x8 Original Mixed Media Transfer

8x8 mixed media image on transfer panel. Original artwork part of the 'Few Are The Giants' Series. 

SERIES STATEMENT -

Few Are The Giants “Few are the giants of the soul who actually feel that the human race is their family circle.” — Freya Stark On the surface, this is a series about Rogers Pass in eastern British Columbia, about the mountains and the highway, the built and natural environments that funnel people through and over and around. It is also about questioning all the things, real and imagined, that give the impression of separateness. Throughout this process of making photographs, digitally altering them, then seeing them again transformed while transferring them to wood or canvas, I’m thinking about all the ways we are connected to one another and to the lands that we travel through. In the tedium of the transfer process, peeling back layers of paper fibre to reveal the image underneath, I find hours of meditative space, time to think about wholeness, the role of the individual within the collective, and the ways that we each experience the world around us in uniquely familiar ways. It is through the individual experience of present moment awareness that we each bring color to life, adding a layer of brightness to the landscapes we see and to the interactions we have with one another. This is what renders invisible threads of connection visible, what makes the fabric of our shared experience apparent and real, proof of our collective wholeness. Though ‘few’ are the giants according to the Stark quote that inspired the title of this series, I believe each of us has the innate (though sometimes inert) ability to see all of humanity as our family circle. We each can be such giants of the soul.

ARTIST STATEMENT -

Claire Dibble "As a project-based artist, the nature of my work is varied. I draw inspiration from time spent in extreme outdoor environments, and also from subtle and colourful moments of everyday life. The projects that I create have a common theme, though the mediums shift from photography to encaustic, from mending to boatbuilding, from audio recordings to bookbinding. That common theme grapples with living in a consumer culture (and how that relates to emotional wellbeing), connection to the natural world, and the possibility of finding moments of awe and vulnerability even amidst altered landscapes. My creative process includes contemplative time in the landscape, photographing small details as well as larger overviews, often recording soundscapes, and collecting bits of manmade and natural ephemera. My largest undertaking to date was a project in 2019 in which I built a kayak and paddled it from source to sea on the Columbia River, 2000 kilometres in 3.5 months."