EMILY BESSER
Gadigal land, Warrang (Sydney)
www.emilybesser.com @emilybesser
Emily Besser lives and works on Gadigal land, Warrang/Sydney. Interested in the practices of drawing and painting, Besser uses these modes to process the different kinds of information that she encounters, whether it be through research or self-reflection practices. Her work is improvisational, emerging from whatever constraints or freedoms affect her access to materials. This allows her to make discreet bodies of work which are one-off, embedded with auto-biographical information and open-ended.
For this body of work titled 'Fugue 38-42', a series of 5 graphite drawings on graph paper, Besser was moving country and without a studio space. Using a stop-animation app, she recorded herself creating the drawings, square by square. Every time a square was filled with graphite, a photograph was taken. The patterns that emerged in each drawing were improvised. While the final physical drawings are static, the five 300-frame stop-animation videos show, without the artist's hands present, the drawings in perpetual construction, and at times deconstruction.
In making the drawings, Besser wondered about the history of pixel art and her own experience in childhood of countless hours spent on games like Boulderdash on her family's Commodore 64 computer. She also remembers being absorbed in a program that allowed her to design a small tile of colourful pixels which could then be repeated and applied as a pattern to create 'wallpaper art' on the computer screen.
