TRUDI VAN DER ELSEN
PORTALS
Curated by Sharon Murphy
Conversation between Sharon Murphy and Trudi van der Elsen Thursday, 29 January 6.45 pm
Opening: Thursday, 29 January 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
PORTALS invites the viewer into a threshold a gateway into another world, a multi-dimensional field where perception expands and the boundaries between the visible and the unseen loosen. Each painting becomes a portal of fiction: a space for projection, meditation, and the gathering of information.
The process of making these works is itself a kind of crossing. Through repeated gestures, erasures, re-markings, and the slow accumulation of surface, a portal gradually comes into being. The paintings evolve through cycles of emergence and disappearance - spaces growing, contracting, dissolving, and re-forming. Time here is dynamic: it is embedded in the movement of paint, in each trace of revision, and in the perceptual shifts that unfold over the duration of making.
The works draw on multiple spatial registers: hyperspace and the digital web, natural space and bodily space, atmospheric and cosmic space. As the layers build, the canvas becomes an experimental terrain where these dimensions meet. The strata of marks form an abstract language, a conversation between lines and openings, between interior and exterior worlds, between what is known and what lies beyond recognition.
To make or to view a portal requires courage. It asks for a loosening of perception and an openness to transformation. These paintings trace that journey, the subtle psychic shifts, the emotional thresholds, the moments where one crosses into a wider field of experience and emerges altered.
Portals may be narrow at first, but once passed through, they release the viewer into unfamiliar expanses: spacious, resonant, and alive with possibility.
https://www.burrencollege.ie/exhibitions/
Newtown Castle, Ballyvaughan, Co.Clare H91 H299
Gallery Hours: Monday – Friday 9:30 am – 5:00 pm
PORTALS
Curated by Sharon Murphy
Conversation between Sharon Murphy and Trudi van der Elsen Thursday, 29 January 6.45 pm
Opening: Thursday, 29 January 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
PORTALS invites the viewer into a threshold a gateway into another world, a multi-dimensional field where perception expands and the boundaries between the visible and the unseen loosen. Each painting becomes a portal of fiction: a space for projection, meditation, and the gathering of information.
The process of making these works is itself a kind of crossing. Through repeated gestures, erasures, re-markings, and the slow accumulation of surface, a portal gradually comes into being. The paintings evolve through cycles of emergence and disappearance - spaces growing, contracting, dissolving, and re-forming. Time here is dynamic: it is embedded in the movement of paint, in each trace of revision, and in the perceptual shifts that unfold over the duration of making.
The works draw on multiple spatial registers: hyperspace and the digital web, natural space and bodily space, atmospheric and cosmic space. As the layers build, the canvas becomes an experimental terrain where these dimensions meet. The strata of marks form an abstract language, a conversation between lines and openings, between interior and exterior worlds, between what is known and what lies beyond recognition.
To make or to view a portal requires courage. It asks for a loosening of perception and an openness to transformation. These paintings trace that journey, the subtle psychic shifts, the emotional thresholds, the moments where one crosses into a wider field of experience and emerges altered.
Portals may be narrow at first, but once passed through, they release the viewer into unfamiliar expanses: spacious, resonant, and alive with possibility.
https://www.burrencollege.ie/exhibitions/
Newtown Castle, Ballyvaughan, Co.Clare H91 H299
Gallery Hours: Monday – Friday 9:30 am – 5:00 pm
Copyright Trudi van der Elsen