Artist 167
Chrisél Attewell
Experimental Art
Chrisél Attewell (born 1994) is a South African artist who specializes in experimental painting, printmaking, sculpture and installation.
She investigates her relationship to the city of Johannesburg as a young female artist moving through the socially constructed spaces of the city.
With new development, and decay of the old, the city is in constant flux, its boundaries are forever mutating. Once bounded and shaped, this socially constructed space, in turn, also influences social relations.
The city is socially produced and is socially reproducing. Attewell uses the medium of printmaking to create an archive of her exploration of the city. Her copper plates are engraved by the forces applied to them on construction sites – spaces that show the changing nature of the city.
Almost as innocent bystanders, the plates capture the energy, memory and history of the city in a specific place and time. In this fluid urban context, renewal and erosion are the concurrent themes in the prints, sculptures and installations on display.
In turn, she uses installation as the embodiment of the in-flux spaces of Johannesburg.
She embraces the masculine materiality and space associated with construction-sites and reforms them with her own female view, subtly referencing the gender politics of urban space.
“I work in multiple mediums, including experimental printmaking, sculpting, painting and installation. My work often explores different ways in which energies, moments, memories and histories can be captured, documented and preserved. The work is very experimental in nature and often takes a performative approach to the process of making. In this, there are initial intentions, but there is an overlapping of uncontrolled processes. These processes ricochet off one another within my different mediums where a shared language emerges from the from the collective of my work”. - Chrisel Attewell
There is a kinetic energy that I find within Attewell’s art. Be it through out her paintings, printmaking or sculpture she creates a fluidity of movement across the layers with each medium.
#chriselattewell #experimentalart #sculpture #chriselvandermerwe #artblog #artistoftheday #artistsoninstagram #artresearch #celebratingart #investigatingart #blog #artist #art #contemporaryart #artistbio #rmbturbineartfair2019
Sources Consulted:
http://assemblage.co.za/…/under-construction-solo-exhibitio…
http://chriselart.com/about/
Comments