Deborah Westmancoat

Bristol

 

www.westmancoat.com

 

I am based at BV Studios, Bristol, and graduated with a first class honours degree in Fine Art from Plymouth University in 2014.  I have a long term interest in alchemy and the philosophical sciences and how they help us to understand our landscape and our place within it.  My work is an ongoing investigation into the traditionally held metaphysical stages of alchemy: nigredo (blackness), albedo (whiteness), citrinitas (yellowing), rubredo (redness), and how these might appear visually in relation to our landscape. I am particularly interested in the points when the stages meet and intersect, how they apprehend each other visually.  What does that look like?  Alchemy is full of verbs.  I combine site-specific waters, often flood, rain, hailstones or snowmelt, with black writing ink and time and wait to see what happens, wait for the story of that place to write itself.

Informed by the floods of 2012 and 2013, recent work has focused on a visual understanding of the dark, inky flux of nigredo, the immersive, incubatory first stage of alchemy. Current work investigates the second stage, albedo, and seeks to illustrate the transformational action of albedic light and order upon the dark, swirling waters of the Nekyia, Jung’s “night journey on the sea”.

Two alchemical works, ‘Black Canvas’ (2013) and ‘Mountain’ (2012) were selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2014 and exhibited at the World Museum, Liverpool Biennial from September to October 2014, The ICA, London from November 2014 to January 2015 and will be touring to The Newlyn Gallery, Penzance from March to May 2015.