Accumulation
Kirsten creates small and large scale self-portraits made from thousands of accumulating, overlapping drawings of herself. These accumulation drawings come from a decade of self-portraiture research, currently exploring the failure of the self-portrait—the impossibility of depicting a full human being in a single image.
The process of accumulation drawing is one of increasing disorientation for the artist; as the layers accrete, it becomes more difficult to track the layer being added. The final layers thus contain an increasing number of anatomical mistakes: lines bridging bodies, eyes within the wrong face, exaggerated and inaccurate proportions. The effect is one of vertigo: the eye is pulled around the drawing, attempting to track a complete figure, becoming lost in its own wanderings.
Kirsten considers self-portraiture as a life-work, where she can put her immediate self in conversation with her past and future selves. She is committed and interested in this dynamic lifetime conversation with herself mediated through artistic technologies. The accumulation drawings serve as a hyper-compressed record of this conversation—the layered drawings take place across months instead of years. Each time she adds a new layer, the drawing is forced into conversation with all the previous drawings upon its surface. This creates an iterative re-reckoning that illuminates the way one’s negotiation of self is always structured by the quagmire of memory.
Works from this series have been exhibited in Muse group show at Incubator Gallery in New York and as part of her solo show Here Loss, Lost Here at Vent Gallery in New York. Here accumulation drawings were also published in Love in The Time of Covid by Glasgow based arts venue and collective The Alchemy Experiment.
Press: Love in the Time of Covid
