According to the writer and philosopher Ernst Jünger, the Forest is a place of existential freedom.
He developed this idea as a metaphor for being able to be part of a system, but also to concurrently be able to maintain one's individuality.
'Dimensions of irrationality and myth are at home in the forest, as the irrational nourishes the capacity for independence'.
Pigments, polymers, enamel, acrylic glass, headphone jack/cord, coral, tulip wood frame. 500x50x500
Artist: Myvanwy Gibson 2016
This is a unique painting from the artist's "Arium" series. 2015-2018
The works are inversed paintings on plexiglass, sometimes combined with artificially coloured panels of plexiglass. Using Italian tulip wood, they are deep box-framed so as the the surrounding light can play with the transparency of the substrate.
The term 'Arium' indicates a place, a location or receptacle. As a suffix it is seen in many words that denote an artificial environment - such as vivarium, herbarium, aquarium, insectarium, terrarium. This particular piece is named after the 'Oophaga' - a genus of poison dart frogs that uses bright aposematic colors to warn potential predators of their unpalatability.
There are 5 works in the series: Amanita, Boomslang, Chironex, Leiurus, and Oophaga.
Myvanwy Gibson reflects on the relationship between technology and painting, the virtual and the real, and the natural and artificial.
Her practice with technology, an interest that was born at the beginning of her career as a video artist, developed through intense experimentation with the relationship between sound and technology to create video images.
She conceives the digital as a language that introduces different fruition parameters from traditional languages. For the artist, nature is evocation not imitation, a non-anthropocentric art where human experience, technology and the natural world intertwine, becoming the themes on which the aesthetics of the artist concentrate.
She has exhibited in numerous private and public areas such as The Australian Centre of the Moving Image, Melbourne; The International Association of Empirical Aesthetics, New York; and The Autonomous Biennale, in Venice. Her research papers have been published in Academia Letters magazine and in the IAEA New York and Vienna proceedings.