artist's statement: Paula Anne Franklin

Artist’s Statement

Computer art offers an opportunity to transform and integrate images. This is particularly useful in memorial art or posthumous portraiture where the central subject is a person no longer living, a central theme in my work. Conceptual art has traditionally pushed boundaries, not only of the materials for creation, but also the method and substantive content. It has confronted societal taboos. My work in memorial art explores the taboo of death as a topic of daily intercourse. Our dominant materialist culture tends to deny the reality that all life includes death as well as birth, to ignore the grief and pain that revolve around separation and endings. This extends to all significant losses whether they involve personal relationships, health, or achievements. So my memorial art embraces the dark side of life with its intense suffering, its chronic pain of unresolved grief while affirming the beauty and joy of living.

Creating these images becomes performance art, a dance of memory over time. Profoundly feminine, taking shape within an intimate, personal, cooperative context, taped and visual material are gathered from participants by discussing memories of critical life events and the loan of old photographs. These inspire the creation of new images that emerge from the photos, a visible archive of past events, and the audiotaped descriptions of the context and aftermath of a significant loss. Cognitive perception, emotional response, dreams and subsequent behavior, mostly invisible, provide the content for my work.
Science is essential to my art, its process, substance and perspective since I use the tools created by science, i.e., the computer, the camera, and the Internet. More important conceptually, we live in a great age of scientific exploration, external focus, measurement and illustration of observable facts, which has provided our culture with a profoundly different view of life, its components and structure. Time, space and energy have been redefined as we explore the universe. Emotional expressions, exploration for personal meaning, integration and transformation are the purview of the humanities and arts, relatively devalued disciplines. This deficit becomes painfully apparent at the time of major personal loss and trauma.

Despite life’s darkness and moments of despair, I affirm life and believe that each of us has been given gifts in our capacity to learn, to grow, to choose how to respond to life, whether to deny or to integrate all its aspects. We all can consciously confront death and the limits of life, struggle to decide whether “’tis better to have loved and lost, than not to have loved at all.” A traumatic loss does not need to be only an individual experience in the new millennium for the viewer to sense John Donne’s universal truth, “Send not for whom the bell tolls, It tolls for thee.”