The Unrepresentable: Art & Sexual Violence

natalie
wadlington
I am fascinated by a painting’s ability to both
reveal and conceal: to represent a thing yet elude
understanding it. On the painted surface, forms
are able to occupy both an articulate identity and
an inarticulate impression, and it is through this
process of showing and disguising that powerful
storytelling can take shape. In my paintings, figures
and spaces come together in narrative compositions
that both illustrate an idea and express its emotional/
psychological implications. I am primarily a symbolic
thinker: I understand and contextualize thought and
experience through metaphor and analogy. These
symbolic representations of ideas unfold in narratives
that are conceptually elaborate and specific. But
in its translation from story to image, the language
of the idea is rearticulated as an experience that is
wordless, material, and personal. In painting, this idea
is contained within the two-dimensional limitations
of a canvas that is both static and a-temporal. This
constraint can be awkward and unsettling as the
viewer tries to navigate within the wordless world
of a figurative painting that is both speaking and
withholding. The unsettling feeling of the undefinable
is what inspires me to render imagery and scenes in
paint. In paintings as in life, interactions between the
subject and the other or between the subject and the
self are full of ambiguity. It is through ambiguity that we
come closer to the complexities of human experience.
If art is a medium between the physical world and the
inner psyche of the artist, then my paintings serve not
only to communicate my symbolic storytelling, but
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also to explore the elusive, emotional potentiality of
dynamic human experiences.
The Mouse on His Wedding Night, Oil on Canvas, 2017, 48”x48” (Top Left)
In and Out, Oil on Canvas, 2016, 24”x30” (Top Right)
Two Acts, Oil on Wood Panel, 2016, 1”x2” (Bottom)
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