ARTIST STATEMENT P. A. WADDINGTON

My work consists mainly of manipulating everyday items so they are able to express an outer manifestation of inner feelings, an essence. This is achieved through a combination of photography, scale alteration, the addition of facets of colour and reorientation. The resulting artwork presents itself to the viewer as initially abstract yet identifiable in its makeup. Further viewing hopefully then brings a richer construct to the work as they bring their own interpretation and experiences into the equation.
At present I mainly work with A4 paper because of its familiarity and its use as a conveyor of information. There is a similarity to the method used by Rorschach where he used inkblots as a method of psychological evaluation. The difference with my work is not to evaluate but create a piece of art that is an essence of a human being or entity, at the same time make an image that is intriguing and a joy to look at.
To remove conscious thought I or another person cuts and crumples a piece of A4 paper in a random way, which creates a 3 dimensional shape. By using elements of chance and random actions a person’s personality or fundamental nature can be captured by the manipulation of an object in this case a piece of A4 paper, in the same way that they walk or hold themselves. It is a signature or thumb print, a 3 dimensional one.
The colour that I apply through lighting is greatly influenced by the work of Wassily Kandinsky who believed that people would need to develop a new kind of spirituality through abstract art with the use of colour and geometrical forms.
Recent discoveries have found that what we actually see is total abstraction of colour and shade and accounts for only ten percent of the information we use in what we perceive. We have no direct access to the physical world than the light that falls directly onto our eyes. The quality of this light is determined by the combination of three things; Transmittance of the space between you and the object, the reflectance of the object and the colours of the illumination. These patterns of light that fall onto your eye are meaningless because they could mean anything. We may look out into the world and see all kinds of meaning but that is because the brain has processed it.
The way the brain sees is that it learns to see. It finds relationships and patterns with images and then it has to associate those patterns with a meaning and it’s that what we see. So in fact we never see what is there all we see is what was useful in the past.
Therefore the paper sculptures become those colours and the object which is open to our own interpretation as any abstract image and may be more representational of reality than we think. Kandinsky had synaesthesia and in his earlier work he was influenced by Russian folk art and its use of bright colours on a dark background. He also believed that the artist could bring about vibrations in the soul through the keyboard of colour.


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