Artist Statement | Sue Rosalind Vesely

Anominalism

I am calling my work Anominalism.  This is to put a name to the idea that it is a natural fit to the mind that a single work should contain more than one language.

We can think of a new name for a colour but not a new colour for an invented word. This is the difference between a thing that exists exclusively in the vision and a thing that has a named identity in the mind.

Things/Events exist in the vision that can only be "named" by a description of the events that cause them.

Such nominal descriptions can only be general, "…sunlight falling through leaves and the shadows hitting the wall…",

whereas the visual representations of them can be specific, (in formal terms, a naturalistic visual equivalent) or general, (a generic derivative of a naturalistic equivalent).

These visual events/things are familiar to all without verbal description.

Representations of the body are read differently to representations of visual things/events because it is ‘us’, and not an external event.

Images of the body may be naturalistic, un-naturalistic, or stylised, any logical representation of physical existence and still be read differently to the other events because they represent us. The figure can be represented generically, androgynous and anonymous, or specifically, and still command in the viewer recognition of identity: he has to recognise humanity - it is us.

Things exist on the canvas as of themselves, and purely visually - a patch of blue paint used in an abstract way, outside our real visual experience.

They exist on the canvas only as artistic values, without reference to phenomena in the visual world off the canvas, without reference to the figure/viewer.  They also occupy a space in the narrative reading, suggesting they might be objects from the real world but existing outside the structure of real visual experience. A strident colour in an otherwise naturalistically derived structure, filling the area that would be occupied logically by another object, will in terms of the narrative of the picture play the role of that object.

The canvas can be read as narrative or fragmented.

So it becomes possible in one work to create an interface between languages where each is seen more clearly. The narrative may be read as whole or fragmented and the mind of the viewer is the operative factor.  This is a confluence of languages expressing or pointing out the nature of the interface between eye and mind.

Sue Vesely, July 2008.