Lorrain Mailer Kent, United Kingdom
I exhibit in United Kingdom and Brazil. My work aims to find a connectivity to our deep past, in an attempt to unravel our human reluctance to take responsibility for our underlining destructive nature. Through the use of every day single use, disposable plastic products to create installations, performances, sculptures, photographic and mark making works.
Using repetitive processes, my practice is one of enfoldment. Fragile, seemingly ephemeral, inconsequential and often using transparent plastic substances, my sculptures and drawings are made from every day, single use materials, achieved through a labour-intensive craft process of duplication or wrapping.
This process of enfoldment is a cathartic and haptic methodology, allowing me to spatially process my sense of grief and loss through the function of my body. To offer a connectivity, that contradicts the empiricism concept of time; where human nature must be continually retaught, to change the default setting of domination, discrimination and double standards. My wrapping processes are suggestive of acts of preservation yet the resulting sculptures, reflective of my mental analysis, lack substance, durability or essential transformation.
Repeating early man’s stick people in my drawings to replicate the swarming migration and exploitation of our natural resources in the name of progress, ideology and humanity.
Yet there is also a problematic challenge rooted in my sculptures due to the ubiquitous plastic material employed, resulting in questions that affects us all, as an intrinsic part of our modern industrial society. Plastics endure, with an outcome still not known, breaking into ever smaller particles to become absorbed into matter. It’s tenacious longevity, taking trillions of years to disintegrate, has the same charaterists of conventional and traditional sculpture which uses stone. The future is unclear, yet remaining embodied in layers of adhesive, will be the trapped traces of the human hand, hermetically sealed in the moment of construction, as a fragment in evolution.
My prevailing concern with plastics has become increasing focused upon the throw away man-made plastics already in existence and with looking at the evidence of our prehistoric creative mind to find a way forward in resolving what has already been manufactured. Leading to the question, is there is a connectivity between our dependency on plastics with our natural intuition to exploit everything around us and will this inevitability facilitate our extinction.