Mark Roller

Lives and works in San Francisco, CA, USA

Artist statement

In the late 1980s I began a project which quickly became the sole focus of my work: what I call a “serial portrait” of a single person, Colette Crutcher, my wife. Starting with a desire to document the physical and psychological changes she underwent while pregnant with our first child I became fascinated with the possibilities inherent in an ongoing depiction of an individual through time; time being the dimension missing from a conventional portrait. Doing a series of works, over a long period, has allowed me to attempt to represent Colette, in many different aspects, as a whole person. Of course, this attempt will always remain just that, an attempt, the goal elusive, the results provisional. Rather than dealing in the objective facts of Colette’s biography, I want, instead, to convey, as completely as I can, my understanding of her subjective experience, through the medium of her body, the outward manifestation of her inward self. Poses and gestures, and indeed, all of the other elements in a sculpture or painting, are meant to express a state of mind or emotion, especially those states which recur and are therefore most characteristic of Colette. At the heart of this, for me, lies the mystery of embodiment. Everything we are, everything we do, we are and do as bodies. Even those seemingly disembodied things we do, like thinking and feeling, we do as bodies. When one lives intimately with another person over the course of years, this central fact of our existence...

Artwork