Art magazines from the city boundaries with Pamela Bain
Art magazines from the city boundaries with Pamela Bain feature in our latest work on Art magazines with Pamela Bain
Graduating from the University of Tasmania with a Bachelor of Fine Art in 1993, Pamela Bain decided to opt out of an honours degree and became a freelance illustrator and graphic artist. After completing her Masters degree, Pamela has returned to making art that excites and moves her. She enjoys working in her Collingwood studio experimenting with materials and exploring the digital potential of computer manipulation.
Pamela Bain’s MAPOLOGY ST VINCENT’S HOSPITAL Melbourne project seeks to inject a sense of life into the stiff rectangular slabs that make up the hospital layout and also to the Fitzroy precinct bordered by Victoria Parade and Brunswick, Nicholson and Gertrude Streets. This body of work has been under development since early 2012 and evolved from her time as Artist in Residence at the hospital. The geographical footprint is largely reinscribed with organic and biological imagery to reflect the medical nature of the institution, being a place where human physicality is investigated and treated.
The following is an excerpt from an article on Pamela Bain’s works featured in the premiere edition of EATT Magazine.
A previous solo exhibition, MAPOLOGY MELBOURNE, uncovers the irregularly shaped suburbs and the weblike structure of roadways and public transport routes of Victoria’s capital city. It recognises the city framework as an organic formation: an organism that lives, breathes and thrives. For Pam the interlocking shapes that form the city’s boundaries, tram/train lines and neighbouring districts are analogous of the human body: an organism having individual components that functions together as a whole much the same as cities of people do. Biological organs that operate separately yet, collectively working together as a whole, parallels a city’s population that functions in much the same way: people operating independently yet as a unit they drive the machinery that makes the city ‘live’.
MAPOLOGY MELBOURNE focuses on a city that was once strange and foreign to the artist thirteen years prior as a newcomer. As any visitor to a city knows direction can be challenging and filled with anticipation. The study of maps – the lines, shapes and contours as well as the place names – formed the basis of exploration and geographical adjustment.
Pamela’s passion for the organic patinas of living matter informs her aesthetic approach: a unique anthropomorphic style that combines harmoniously with chart diagrams and alludes to the mutative nature, growth and movement within the city and around it.Pam does not seek to recreate map markings, “why bother when they are works of art in themselves” Pam stated. “I reinterpret the maps and areas in my own stylistic impressions.”
With more locations to creatively plunder such as Florence, Chicago and Austin, MAPOLOGY will continue, however, a new direction has developed stemming from both her previous work and an ever long passion for space scape plus all manner of cosmic related imagery and several visits to NASA (Houston).Pamela’s latest project, BIOTIC COSMIC, applies to a range of paintings that examine the similarities and connectedness between the physical essence of the universe and micro biotic matter.
EARTHLY UNIVERSE
Responding to the uncanny resemblance of microbiology and organic material to space scape imagery, EARTHLY UNIVERSE speaks to the observation that we and the cosmos share mutual composition and, thus, connection – visually inferring the physical relationship between micro matter, organic material, cosmic substance and the universe. On one hand it appears as bloody, rocky, earthy, veiny and visceral while on the other it can be viewed as an ‘other worldly’ glowing circular formation that floats silently..
BIOTIC COSMOS
Extending upon the visually exotic world captured by the Hubble telescope, Pamela Bain’s research, painterly experimentation and computer manipulation forges new creative discoveries. BIOTIC COSMOS may evoke macro association with star clusters, maybe hurricane blasts of stellar winds, perhaps blistering ultra violet radiation, or a ring of new born stars as in the early phases of a cartwheel galaxy. On the other hand this work may induce biological interpretations on a microscopic level that details our own organic matter.
LIGHT SOURCE
Back lit by a vibrant white glow, LIGHT SOURCE maintains a circular motif styled upon the Ancient Egyptian symbol for light. Propelled by an innate drive to feel connected to something larger, which may be at the core of all religion including the early Egyptian’s sun worship, this work, for the artist, contains not only an organic/biological/cosmic interrelationship, but spiritual underpinnings also. As the artist continues to navigate her way through life new understandings emerge that informs her place in and with her environment both on Earth and in the universe. It’s a circular path she travels: an outbound expedition that loops back to the individual bringing with it a deeper awareness of self.
OUT THERE INSIDE
At the basis of every living thing there exists Deoxyribonuleic acid or DNA. OUT THERE INSIDE is an aesthetic allusion to the intertwining DNA helixes which contain the codified genes that makes us each unique individuals. Genes determine what we look like on the outside and also what occurs on the inside, giving weight to psychological pre dispositions. OUT THERE INSIDE is also an aesthetic cipher: a symbol for outward investigation of new places and outer space imaginings that return back to the self – the biological universe within the physical body which is connected to and united with the universe out there.
PLANETARY ORGANICA
This spherical formation, like a planet suspended in space, unifies the aesthetics of organic tissue while at the same time evokes the rapturous splendour of the universe. PLANETARY ORGANICA reflects the uncanny visual parallels that microbiology and cosmology share. This piece can be viewed as a biological matrix of dense irregular connective tissue or, alternatively, suggestive of cloud strands that consist of cold hydrogen gas pertinent to star formation.
WHITE ENERGY
If ‘dark energy’ is the force that holds the universe together with the strength to pull it in and push it out perhaps there also exists a force that could be termed, ‘white energy’ that operates on a different plane. Those sharing a near death experience commonly report the presence of a white light: a power so brilliant, magnetic and strong that it has the ability to separates the spirit from the material body and draw it to another dimension. True or not it is a captivating and thought provoking concept. WHITE ENERGY with its circularity, organic shapes and light whiteness intuits the unknown: perhaps the brightness and harmony of the ‘other side’.
Art magazines with Pamela Bain
Pamela’s work will also be featured as an In-House Artist for Swinburne University and the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, Pamela Bain is working on their science project – Deeper, Wider, Faster – which is looking for and analysing fast transients such as supernovae, fast radio bursts and other deep space phenomena.
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