The Lexicon of Lycanthropy - Sandra Uray-Kennett

Opening - 12:00 AM - Wednesday, 7th of December

Artist Talk - 6:00 PM

Running - 7 Dec 2011 - 23 Dec 2011

'My whole life has been spent walking by the side of a bottomless chasm, jumping from stone to stone. Sometimes I try to leave my narrow path and join the swirling mainstreamm of life, but I always find myself inextricably drawn back to the chasms edge and there I shall walk until the day I finally fall into the abyss.' Edvard Munch

The Lexicon of Lycanthropy is an attempt to represent my intimate confrontation with a relentless and unpredictable barrier. These works reflect my experience of bearing witness to the hermetic and isolating sublimity of schizophrenia. I am interested in a world that by its very nature is inaccessible, an ambiguity that appears adrift and anchorless…What will be seen by the viewer of the artworks will be brief constructions of a witnessing ,a mutual understanding, present in the moment of making and seeing.I am not trying to represent what has happened behind the schizophrenic's eyes, but rather what has happened in front of my own. However, the oscillation between madness and my seeing of it, experiencing, can at times be so rapid as to disallow a distinction between the two of us. This illness is, to me, beyond language, utterly beyond belief. Emotions war in me constantly. Primal anger, shock, terror, the plunge of grief…a complex relationship, simplified, perhaps…

'what do you see after the rain?''the raindrops falling from the fig tree looks like coloured glass. When they hit the ground they smash into a thousand tiny pieces

I know what that feels like.'

Sandra Uray-kennett is currently a PhD (Visual Arts) Candidate at The University of South Australia. Her object-based works have developed out of a painting practice which was intitally inspired by the 19th Century photographic iconography documenting female hysteria. Sandra's current works are an investigation into schizophrenia and it's language(s), in particular its slippages and pauses. She was selected to exhibit her work at Hatched in 2009 at PICA and has recently exhibited her work 'silent/ly witness blood making noise' in the odradekaeaf projectspace in June 2011. Sandra has also recently returned from Oxford University where, in 2009 she presented her paper entitled 'music from another room'. In September 2011 presented and chaired at the 4th Global Conference on Madness, and as one of only two international artists represented, she shared her current research entitled 'six more impossible things before breakfast; an investigation into the language(s) of madness'.