Pamela Schilderman

My practice is influenced by science exploring notions of identity and individuality through repetition, often juxtaposing microcosm and macrocosm as though adjusting the lens of a microscope. I seek to challenge people's preconceptions and definitions of painting, drawing and sculpture through varied approaches - the use of unconventional materials like blood in Gorgonium sapianum or by expanding the boundaries of artistic disciplines when liberating works like Punctum from the two-dimensional frame. History plays a critical role in my museum interventions where I instigate a three-way dialogue between the onlooker, the permanent collections and my art at its core. They are all deliberately provocative encouraging the viewer to question value, in EcologyNOW it is our value as humans whilst in the Harold Thomas Collection it is the value of art.

I am attracted by the everyday made beautiful. In Needle, toilet paper is transformed, imbued with a lace-like quality, and in Bula Matari humble table salt becomes an ethereal world of stalactites and stalagmites. My fascination with the infinitesimal world within a world surrounding us, invisible to the naked eye, has given rise to my recurring reference to atoms in the form of dots. Hidden or transformed, this adopted symbol, perfect in its ability to avoid any fixed reference - is always there; in oil paintings Sperm and Ovulation they are captured in motion whilst in Oculto they lie buried deep under the glossy surface of eliminated brushstrokes. Ultimately, my art evokes uncertainty by revealing a part, but not the whole - it teases the viewer’s cognitive senses by blurring the distinction between what they know and what they see.

Wishing Well

Salt crystals, glass, copper coins, shells, rope, perspex and audio

L 77cm x W 77cm x H 151cm

2020

£9,000.00

Wishing Well was created as an antidote, a beacon of hope that humanity can collectively heal the planet. I am fascinated by salt and its multiple uses: food, industry, ritual, healing; it is an everyday medium we take for granted that was once so prized. Integral to the well is the act itself of making a wish, an act I find beautiful, when visitors insert coppers in the coin slot an audio plays of tingling salt crystals.