TRANSFRONTALIÈRE (TRANSBORDER WOMAN)
As a visual artist, I have always thought of technique as a means, not an end.
After studying print-making at the La Cambre school of art and design, I took up painting. Twenty years later, I felt that I was beginning to repeat myself, so decided to take a break from this medium. While still concerned with the concept of trace, and memory (both collective and personal), I am moving away from painting as a specific technique, no longer convinced that it is right for what I am trying to say and do.
Since 2000 I have been using a range of media, including photography, drawing, and collage, as well as publishing artists' books and ‘works of comparative thought’, curating exhibitions and making videos, preferring to juxtapose contrasting elements, letting fragments jar the eye.
I have often started a new work or project by taking a risk, and this includes the idea of two professions or networks coming together.
“In the recent development of the arts and the way they have been thought about, postmodernism has unearthed everything that has helped destroy the theoretical edifice of modernism — like passages and mixtures between the arts, destroying the Lessingian orthodoxy of separation; destroying the paradigm of function in architecture, with the return of curves and ornament; destroying the pictorial / two-dimensional / abstract model with a return to figuration, signification and the gradual invasion of painting galleries by three-dimensional and narrative forms, from pop art to installations and video art ‘rooms’; new combinations of painting and the spoken word, monumental sculpture and the projection of shadows and light; exploding the serial tradition with new mixtures of genres, ages and musical systems.” Jacques Rancière
Constantly on the move: it's also about being where you're not expected to be.
Updated on 30rd November 2007
Works © Annick Blavier