Nancy Goldring — Mixed media visual artist

Whether a strange landscape, a familiar interior, or even a dream, I draw to understand the experience place and how we understand it. My concern is to produce studies which convey a sense of the site that is revelatory of its history and its context, I pay careful attention to detail and issues of scale, dimension and how the space is utilized. The drawings are perceptual, reflecting careful scrutiny capable of generating an accurate rendering of what I have seen.
Simultaneously I investigate the social-historical aspects, which are invisible and yet present, whether I am exploring a view of the Hudson or an ancient site in Sri Lanka. My concern is to produce studies that convey a sense of the site in a way that incorporates its history and its context. At this point, I have come to know the place in a deeper sense and intend that the drawing reflect my investigations.
In the next phase I generate a bas relief collage based on my sketches. The shadows that are cast by the raised elements begin to heighten our belief in the illusionistic world of the two-dimensional drawing. In the final stage of my working process, I project segments of slides I have taken on site or archival photos onto the bas relief and photograph the projection with the bas relief as base or architecture. I then begin to experiment with a wide range of slides that function as propositions -or “what ifs.” The final stage is photographed in my analog process in my exploration of space.
All together they produce images that contain the intricate nature of human perception by re-ordering visual information to propose irreconcilable time frames, shifting vantage points, changing moods, and memory traces. Each image represents one of the many possible ways of evoking a place or a moment; and the series altogether suggests the complex way we experience the world. Some of the series have been presented as large-scale time-based installations in which the images dissolve and fade into each other. Seen this way, the sequence seems to excavate a real or imagined archaeological site thereby slowly revealing a rich sedimentation of an irrecoverable past.