VICTORIA AHRENS

My work was selected for an exhibition at the Kyoto Seika’s Gallery Fleur, Japan for an exhibition of emerging contemporary printmakers:

A solo curating project, organized by Chelly Saenz and sponsored by Partner Capital at 23 Grafton Street. The beautiful Georgian front room is transformed into a gallery space for this exhibition of 11 artists’ work. The Day Remains refers to an inversion of the title of the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro (Remains of the Day,…

Working through ideas of sliding screens, landscapes that alter with display and positioning, I have created a series of hand made book covers with silkscreen colour field prints and photographic transfer collages. The bleached out colours slide in front of the photographic images, variously obscuring them and allowing the viewer only a fragment of the…

An exhibition of Printmaking and Book Arts at Camberwell College, 3rd Floor Studios- The first of a three part series called DIS/PLAY including a participatory review with all artists and a chance to present a new piece of work  

  Testing out projections of the clouds film in the night onto different surfaces- part of a new project bringing sublime moments to urban settings- in an ongoing collaboration with Giuseppina Esposito as part of Hung, Drawn and Altered curatorial series- Hung, Drawn and Altered, for baylorsanddiamond. Here the inexorable changing of the sky is…

Using sugar lift techniques on steel plates, printed onto Japanese paper and mounted on hand made book covers, the liquid outlines of the ‘drawing’ or painting are repeated in different configurations. These are paired back from images of lakes (lacuna 1/2) and become small worlds in their own right- fragmented, small pools are filled in…

  Photo transfer collage of the Turkana Basin- where the oldest humanoid remains have been found: Turkana Boy. Also one of the most hostile environments on earth, very little grows or flourishes here. World’s largest alkaline lake. Fragments of the landscape are transferred onto book board with only the barest traces of the original coming…

interim show at Wilson’s Road:

Here I took three photographs of dark rain clouds and manipulated them in order to create the illusion of the sun coming through the clouds, and disappearing again, by over and underexposing the images gradually. These I then shaped in a round format to imitate the shape of a planet,  the pupil of an eye…

  This is how the piece is looking as an installation. I have become increasingly interested in the origins of environmental sciences and the writings of Robert Angus Smith, the 19th century Scottish chemist who pioneered research on air pollution and acid rain. I am particularly interested in the fact that he refused to take…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/aug/19/scienceandnature Great article on the contemporary sublime. I have been looking at the origins of the sublime, Longinus and his rhetorical sublime. First known proponent of a treatise on the sublime, Peri Tou Hupsou, dating back to 1st century A.D, (although neither author nor the date of writing is considered a historical certainty), discusses oratory…

Digital transfer Print, Japanese shodo paper in layers I am interested in the symbols and subjects of the Romantic period, and translating them into a contemporary environment. Here the layers of Japanese paper work on the translucent surface of the transferred image to create depth. Rather than sublime in its aesthetic sense, it is sublime…

“Clouds of any one of the aforementioned modifications [of the Nimbus or Raincloud], at the same degree of elevation, may increase so much as completely to obscure the sky: (…) and the effect of this obscuration may be such as would induce an inattentive observer to expect the speedy fall of rain.” (Forster, 1823: 31)…

In order to get to this as a final image, I first went through a multitude of different versions, on tracing paper, transparent paper, moving the ink around the surface of the transfer. Although these were interesting experiments, I ended up coming back to the original images and starting from scratch again to find the…

In Nebula photographs of clouds over south east London are transferred onto the wall and hang below lithographs of solid matt colours.  The images reference Constable’s romantic cloud studies, while questioning what looking at the sky means in the 21st century: with airplanes that menace, and changing environments, the sky is a place of fear…

http://www.metacafe.com/…/circular_painting_the_tondo/ The name ‘tondo’ comes from the Renaissance period, and is “the ultimate in constructed painting. It is demanding both formally and metaphorically” (William Zimmer, The Tondo, in Art Journal, Vol. 50, No. 1, Constructed Painting (Spring, 1991), pp. 60-63-Published by: College Art Association). Zimmer goes on to say that, “the tondo is the most…