NAOMI SCHLINKE
Artist Statement re Oceans of Ink

I am drawn to the sensuous and the contemplative, to wonder and ambiguity. My work celebrates the flux of living form and the patterns that underpin reality.

The materials themselves serve as my starting point. The liquidity of ink allows me to use the brush like a seismograph and my hand like a shovel. Momentary and unique in the way that process-based art can be, these are images of “formation in progress”, equally legible at the micro or macro levels.

Some aspects of an image can be found in a flash, others reveal themselves slowly and methodically. Each painting is a culmination of the deliberate and the serendipitous, the visual as well as the kinesthetic. Along the way I conjure images of things and not-things, forces and consequences. Evocative, unstable forms take on meaning, association and even narrative possibilities when imagination is given free rein.