The House She Wants to Build
A series of paintings and sculpture, dimensions variable, 2019
The House She Wants to Build is inspired by the artist’s own childhood home, and by considering the notions of dwelling and existence, she sees herself as one with the house and even extends out from the basement floor to reach deep into the ground, whereby she reaches the childhood homes of her parents and even her ancestors. She sees infinite of possibilities with this house, where different shapes and forms are imaginable. However, although tangible, it is immaterial and is without a name. This house serves as a metaphor, and it could be seen as a human body, a concept, an imagery, a value, and an ideology, and it could even be a proposal for the future. The artist fully exposes her own inner state of mind through the highly supernatural and mysterious forms of object. Through the imagery of home and the meaning it embodies, Kuo has created a model with sculpture derived from her consciousness, which pays tribute to the memories of her own family.
The current series of painting work reflects a further development that combines the abstract and the figurative, fusing musical expressiveness with recurring geometrical forms.
Suspended at strategic points within the dynamic and indeterminate swathes of paint, they appear to be – simultaneously – the stabilizing and destabilizing element within the composition, embodying a liminal stillness whilst at the same time threatening to tumble towards the edge of the painting. The aesthetic explores interrelated binaries of control and disorder, the rational and irrational, and the artist’s personal subconscious and that of the socially regulated.
Those paintings are products of Kuo’s childhood and what she experienced in the Taiwan society, and the knowledge that she’ve absorbed shape the way she paint.
