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“Painting is fundamental to my practice and I have found it to be very similar to sound production. I use both to create a spiritual space that can be shared, as well as experienced individually. I believe all painting is abstract, even if it holds universally recognisable signs or images. Both painting and sound are not defined by signs or images - they are simply used to create energy between them. For this reason I don’t begin with an intellectually imposed meaning, statement, or declaration upon the artwork. I don’t think art has a meaning. I believe artworks are sacred beings and holders of energy - physical energy which simply comes down to physics. I’m very interested in physical science and I believe the properties and laws we come across in our physical world also apply to art. So I begin with an empty space, and continue working until I discover a new space that can be perceived from multiple viewpoints. A work is not finished until it is a credible space with objective dimensions that can stand on their own.  At this point the art work becomes a living entity.” 

 

 

Edy Ferguson’s artistic practice incorporates painting, sculpture, performance, installation and sound. In her works we can trace references from multiple sources – commercial rock and pop music, American advertising culture, cinema, the spirit of punk and dada, to the traditions of abstract expressionism. Ferguson utilises such references and images from popular culture into her work in appreciation of their intrinsic ability to become signifiers, maintaining a different meaning for the individual, all the while remaining instantly recognisable. In a process the artist describes as ‘social archaeology’, Ferguson attempts to visually record, deconstruct and reformulate the mechanisms behind our hyper-retinal culture in her own artistic accent.

 

Music forms an essential part of Ferguson’s practice and she has art directed many commercial music videos, culminating in the 1993 MTV Music Video Award for Jeremy by Pearl Jam, as well as subsequent video and music installations for fine art institutions and galleries. Ferguson’s practice in sound, as well as painting, is a process of dissolution followed by reconstruction. Following a Synaesthesia in colour and form, her paintings are characterised by rhythm, vibration and resonance. Her works carry their own internal rhythm, defined by a symbiosis of intuition and structure, inviting both sensory and cerebral interpretation. 

 

Ferguson sees the paintings as distinctly urban landscapes.  She plays with the constraints of a kind of ‘restricted viewing’ found in obstructed theatre stages.  Through them she creates windows, doors, cliffs and sliced horizons to reveal an inner reality which remains constant even as form and colour endlessly shift in a process of continual transformation. 

 

Ferguson likes the play between opulent urban grit and the erotic, clean gloss of seductive advertising media. Used together, both tell a more complete story of how we live, which she playfully comments on between the lines. Ferguson likes to create visual and aural mash-ups that suddenly divert the common meaning of signifiers to something more private and essential.

 

Painting, Installation and Sound become exercises in seeing that compel the viewer to experience their environment in novel ways. In the act of dissolution and reconstruction we find a new emotional resonance. In her paintings on canvas, sound pieces and immersive installations, Ferguson creates an expanse of both aural and pictorial space, inviting the viewer to not only see, but to feel and sense the fullness of reality.

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