Rebecca Wallis

Lives and works in Auckland, New Zealand

Artist statement

I break and restructure the traditional painting to reconsider and question the expected certainty of the tangible - creating transparency from the fixed surfaces, dissolving the edges and boundaries. I make analogies between the painting and the Self. My practice is triggered by Western Culture's obsession with the fixed, what it can touch and what it knows. There are strange subjective allusive moments, that cannot be acknowledged within our binary culture, of when we are in a state outside of who we know ourselves to be. When boundaries of the Self have collapsed. My paintings create a dialogue between light and the materiality of the Object to recognise states of the Self that fall somewhere on the precipice, just outside of recognition.Of abjection, the confronting state of being when the order that separates the Self from the Other loosens. This state, of the loosening of order is a collapsing of who I think I am. My practice is triggered by these uncanny contradictory states. I experience myself somehow between separation and wholeness, between these binaries. These momentary subjective experiences I have described as an “Unsaid Turning”, they are contemplative experiences, moments that I can not necessarily describe, words slipp away and feelings resist containment. I cant explain, hold them or label them yet I know this to be a universal experience, at moments felt by us all subjectively. These experiences take the Self out of its conditioned narrative of words...

Artwork