Acts of Meaning (1993-1995)

Artist Statement

Media: Acrylic paint, oil and chalk pastels, modeling clay, recycled objects on stretched and prepared canvas: 8x10", 10x12", 12x14".

Through my art I strive to focus on seeing intensely and immediately - to live and to communicate the present moment because it holds all things from the past and all opportunities for the future. The images in these paintings are simply recorded responses of day to day experiences which are a reflection of the environment and culture I live in.

With this series I explore my visual memory using the idea of ‘inside out’ by working with drawing materials on the raw canvas underside of commercially prepared canvas. The rough wooden frames are embellished with sculpted three dimensional material which echo the canvas image. In this way showing that our lives are reactionary and reflective - ‘what we feel and think, we then become’.


Artist’s note:
Two years after beginning this series of work I read a book by man who practices and teaches psychology. Dr. Jerome Bruner says in his book Acts of Meaning that for him it is a “return of the repressed”. In forty years of his career he feels that he has come full circle. The completion of this body of art work brings me to my fortieth birhday. The series contains forty individual pictures and borrows the book title in homage to Dr. Bruner.The following is a quote from his book.
“ Making sense via seeking meaning as opposed to seeking understanding via computable information. With this shift toward computing technology we have completely forgotten to account for how we learn what we learn and why. Information processing forgets that we learn by determining the importance of an idea because of it’s relevance to us as individuals, that we make sense of things by seeking meaning.”
Acts of Meaning by Jerome Bruner , Harvard University Press.


Odette Nicholson
October 1995