Stanley Picker Gallery is pleased to be hosting Earth Do Not, Cover My Blood, a series of monotype, dry point intaglio prints by Isali Arielle.
Earth do not cover my blood, let there be no resting place for my outcry. – Job 16:18
It’s not a question, but a statement; Blackening the course of time with acrid smoke. Imprinting into history, etched into the paper. Within the cracks of darkness lie the ascent into light.
The prints are exploring the interplay and conflict between control and oppressive gestural mark making. Smudged, dark shadows, hold a life force of chaotic, natural energy held within scratching lines born from the release of frustration and the urge to destroy. Formed as a response to visiting Poland’s death camps, jutting marks, like scars on skin echo the demolished structure of the crematorium. Revealing the contrast between technological advancements and their capacity for evil; raising questions of the experience of generationally inherited trauma. The prints contain expelled kinaesthetic energy as a therapeutic release for overwhelming emotion; worked through scratching aluminium plates from all angles and directions with full force and gestural motion. The impulse to scratch reveals a process of cathartic destruction, uncovering an innate truth. Using traditional techniques such as printmaking to scratch away, eroding the plate further exhibits the conflict between the traditional and the technological. Much like memory, prints can be either discarded or preserved. Memorial is a print. The slight mark on the plate or paper is a proof of the maker. A stain imprinted as permanently as desired to be. From the cold blackened structures, the dead will rise.
Isali Arielle is a multimedia artist and Fine art student at Kingston University. Her practice spans various mediums such as printmaking, sculpture, painting and installation with the aim of creating a sensory overloaded environment disorientating and hypnotising the viewer. Her work features recurrent motifs creating a language comprised of symbols, forming a code connecting to something beyond us. Exploring themes of ancient wisdom, capturing the clash of existence torn between the roots of the ancestral, the pull of the spiritual, and the chaos of materialism.