Josie Osborne - Artist Statement

Lacan’s views on loss, longing and desire have lent language to more clearly describe my own experience and that which I have been comforted in realizing as an integral part of our human condition. This concept as both private experience and shared awareness has been infused into my work for many years, long before reading Lacan. I believe that this is what often drives creative work. Darkness is not obliterated or ignored but rather reshaped into beauty or a revelatory offering, chaos transformed into some semblance of fragile order. An awareness exists of the space between things that is charged with a desire to be connected.

The bird imagery that has been present in both my prints and boxes, offers an analogy to that within us, which is fragile and timeless--the intuitive, child-like side of our existence that is increasingly difficult to access as life becomes more fast-paced and complex. I also love the written word, found text and poetry. Certain poetry has the ability to bring the everyday together with the abstract, intangible and even spiritual. Emily Dickinson, Mary Oliver, Walt Whitman and others have lent me words, providing a stepping off point for my work.

In my assemblage boxes the elements used and the organization or treatment of space references dreams, architecture, the weight of emotions or the diagramming of the imagined mechanics behind something like the change of seasons or astrological movements. They place the necessary openness to non-physical possibility in parallel to that which we physically experience in the world.

The structure of my prints, collages and boxes are a response to a fascination with the containment of charged spaces that can be experienced without needing to physically inhabit them. They each offer a small environment that is highly ordered, referencing book pages with gold-leafed edges, text block guides etched into the plexi-glass front, even text derived from poetry or taken directly from a dictionary page. Dickinson’s work provided inspiration for Thoughts of Sky (Emily’s Susan) from a letter poem written by Dickinson to Susan and Those Who Know Her (a portion of a line from a Dickinson poem) that continues Know Her Less the Nearer Her They Get. Both boxes explore the significance of human relationships, their power in influencing our creative lives and our shifting views of reality.

My intaglio prints with mixed media additions explore the way that the constructed stage-like space of my boxes can be translated into two dimensions. I develop a structured framework that acts as a template or stage in which the “action takes place” The series titles Triptych (based on a small altar from the Byzantium) and Closed Altar (based on the Ghent Altar piece) refer to the compositional source of each series. The secondary title in parentheses alludes to the content within that framework.
Sing/singe addresses the fragility realized in response to the unexpected disruptions during moments of joyful calm, while it plays with words found together on a dictionary page. The central element in Lost Legend is the image of the Quetzal, a Guatemalan bird of mythical proportions and great cultural significance that appears to be all but extinct. The Closed Altar prints, created more recently, offer a less representational/metaphorical approach through schematic drawings that describe a machine-like function capable of measuring or producing the intangible.

In all of the work I utilize the precision of architectural drawing in conjunction with shapes and vocabulary inspired by modernist painting. I use the arch form in order to provide an opening, passageway or proscenium to frame a central experience while alluding to something hidden or secondary taking place beyond the wings (the hierarchy of conscious and subconscious experience). Lacan wrote of a constant longing for something intangible, magical existence and a void that we try to fill in myriad ways. The duality in my work exists as an attempt to invoke the balance that we strive for between order and chaos in daily life.

I feel a present need that in many ways parallels that of the 1940’s and 50’s, a desire to create opportunities for quiet contemplation and simplified information in response to the chaos, visual noise and uncertainty that exists in our day-to-day. Like artists of that period, but with more history and technology from which to draw, I want to create a body of work that expands upon my previous research, as a stepping-off point. I cannot seem to avoid having Lacanian ideas infused in my work. It is still about longing, loss and desire. But the message is both personal and increasingly universal.