Rosalind Newby

It’s expansive and cyclical. It’s small and vast. It’s the here and now, alongside everything that has ever been or will be. 

This is life expressed. A way of processing, challenging, accepting, and coping - an attempt to navigate the quotidian, through the day-to-day, through life, through death, and beyond and back again.

Things are defined by constraint or release. Constraint the external. Release the internal. Two elements to express things such as desire versus commitment or the subjective versus the emotive. 

And where these two meet and vie for control, this contiguous point, is the heart of the matter.

And living within and recording this balancing act - the interplay, the thrust, and pull - the increasingly imbalanced relationship between human life and the natural world merges with personal struggles.

Yet, somehow, situating the lived experience of a small world within the world of everything - all existence, the eternal return - there is some consolation. My small odyssey placed within the vast odyssey of all life. All formed and acted out in a creative playground. A parallel world where everything is reduced to a manageable size in an attempt to deal with life and death - playing, reasoning, grieving, forming resilience and finding optimism.  

Responding to ‘the cyclical’ and ‘eternal return', things are recycled, repurposed, re-interpreted, re-visited, re-evaluated. As things flow in and out of focus, never leaving, just there, waiting for their time, to be brought back into play.

And by building on a ‘store’, having things to hand - the physical, the experience, the concepts - I respond ‘in the moment’. Forming/articulating thoughts during process - process as a means of processing, enabling post-process analysis.

Inspiration is more happenstance than sought and it controls the narrative. And what I make seems to exist beyond me and by observing it I try to understand what it is and how it came into being and what it might go on to be (like my own children!). And I sense things as living and animate. And I like to be surrounded by responses, looking, listening, absorbing, engaging - the making is just the start of the process, or my part within it. And the process is responsive - as a need to express happens, a means to express materialises. And outcomes are eclectic and diverse in appearance, structure and process. 

I sometimes feel as if I’m standing still whilst the world is flowing through me, leaving deposits and, as a result, my mind is filled with the eclectic and, as a result, my practice is a hotchpotch of materials and processes, experience and experimentation and it can be anything - and it can be found or thought, as well as made.