The Diary of a some day Theatre Designer: Pamela Schilderman

I thought I had added this artist months ago but obviously not. Anyway, I found this artists work at an exhibition at the Harley Gallery, her piece 'Punctum' was there. 'The exhibition was called Precious' and was about reclaiming art and craft. I liked Pamela's work but after looking at her website I liked it more. I really like the idea of 'Bula Matari'. She has made small salt crystals and put them in interesting shaped jars. I actually tried to make a salt crystal after looking at her work. It didn't go very well but I will upload a photo at some point anyway.

All of Pamela's work is different but then again I think it all connects because she uses small things and makes big things out of them.

Pamela Schilderman's complex body of work exhibits a critical interest in science, nature and beauty, always from the point of view of the artist. Schilderman's practice encompasses drawing, painting, photography and three-dimensional work to cross expected categorising boundaries. Although seemingly disparate, her body of work is held together by key motifs such as the circle or 'dot' as well as notions of transformation, repetition and the links between knowledge and intelligence. Schilderman's shifting, indeterminate practice is sometimes organic and often otherworldly; suggestive of familiar things but never explicit. Much about her work remains deliberately hidden from the viewer, and this elusiveness places onus on us to develop a dialogue with the work.

The artist’s desire to transform both ideas and materials is evident in one of her key works, the large scale Bula Matari. This takes the idea of growth as a point of departure, and salt as the primary material, with these two things being transformed conceptually and materially to form intricate crystals displayed en masse. Another one of Schilderman’s primary materials is paper, the use of which stems from an interest in the strength, frailty and relative modesty of the material. Some of her three-dimensional works such as Respiracao and Punctum literally use paper within their construction, whereas Miniatures 30, a group of tiny pen on paper drawings each capture one minute from a video of paper dots in movement. She frequently uses a variety of processes to move objects, materials and ideas away from their original source, and the work becomes increasingly abstracted along the way.
Schilderman finds beauty in the small variations to be found in things which might seem at first to be identical. Drawing on ideas of repetition and visual saturation, she is interested in how we select information from the world around us, and how this is reconfigured and processed by the eye and the brain. For example, in her installation Allusions, she uses thousands of polystyrene balls and paper dots to overwhelming effect. Gradually, the eye alights on subtle differences between the tiny objects that make up the work, whilst simultaneously recognising the larger whole. The idea is linked to her exploration of the connections between visual information, knowledge and intelligence, playing with occlusion and display to direct how the work is viewed and experienced.
Schilderman is interested in creating an intensively private experience when viewing her pieces, akin to that of a reader being absorbed within a novel, drawing on the natural curiosity of the viewer and the ambiguities of the work itself. She often makes site-specific work and describes this experience as like encountering small worlds which once you step into becoming larger and all-consuming. The installation of Schilderman’s work, sometimes suspended or shown en masse, is suggestive of organic or alien forms that seem to belong to, and to grow from the walls or ceilings of a given space. Despite the calmness of her work, aesthetically it hovers on the point of confusion, as both meaning and form seem to shift before your eyes. The artist deftly interweaves disparate materials and concepts, exploiting their inherent subtleties within her continually evolving practice.

written by Anneka French