Sawako Ando

2000-2002 Slade School of Fine Art, MFA, Painting
1998-2000 Chelsea School of Art & Design, BA, Painting

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Artist Statement

My painting is a combination of abstraction and metaphorics. I want to express how macrocosmic global events can affect the lives of individuals in the microcosm, triggering senses of fear and anxiety.

We are all connected in some way to feelings and experiences of loss, and I feel this extends to an expression reliant on a collective empathy we refine in tradition and in art.

In part, this is my journey and forms the basis of my work; simple elements take on a resonance with these aspects of life, like empathetic diagrams, laden with affect. I want for my painting to represent invisible grammars, systems of connection that are fragile and unfold over time.

Using inks and washes that permeate the canvas, I want to locate the focus of attention on the materiality and surface qualities of my means. My grids maintain their flatness, resisting any tendency toward illusionistic space.

I need to find forms that resist being permanently fixed. Through processes of spilling and seeping, my surfaces become subject to laws of chance and randomness. The irregularity of this procedure affords an asymmetry and nuanced order, a contingency to their stable geometry.

Here I believe metaphorical resonances can emerge that connect pictorial form with experiences and emotions relating to the passage of time; the dot grids can evoke feelings of loss and sadness as they invoke transience and mortality (our ‘temporal schema’)

The washes I employ give a sense of trace, of absence and of something departed. I sometimes use colour to lighten, to provide some relief from a tragic view of life.

In this sense perhaps my work is akin to Eastern philosophical traditions in which time and passing are conceived in different terms to the West. I work to resist the Western avoidance and suppression of mortality – our consumerist, technological society dehumanises in its promotion of a blindness in this respect. The elderly are removed from social consciousness, death becomes the unnameable and is censored from our immediate environment; a ‘progressive’, ‘productive’, youthful commodity culture is cloaked in a fundamental denial.

Sawako Ando
2003

Prizes, Scholarships and Awards
12/2001 The Slade Bursaries
11/2001 The Thomas Scholarship
08/2000 R K Burt Prize
03/2000 Artex Paris, First Prize
09/1999 Artex Paris, First Prize

Sawako Ando

2000-2002 Slade School of Fine Art, MFA, Painting
1998-2000 Chelsea School of Art & Design, BA, Painting