Silvia Renard - 'Macro/Mico'

Mixed media: heat treated tyvek paper, lutradur fabric, printed images and acrylic paint

When I started this project, before the pandemic, I wanted to combine scientific micro/macro images with ceramic tiles.

My aim was to show the visual relation between both worlds using images, most of them taken by scientists, some drawings and paintings I’ve made, and put them together in an abstract composition.

With the Corona virus breakdown, I had to rearrange my plans and change the materials. With help from a book I borrowed from college, I decided to have a go at using Tyvec paper and also Lutradur fabric to experiment and develop my ideas.

I am using the beauty of natural shapes, patterns and textures as a source of inspiration and have taken and distorted source images from other artists’ work and images in books and on the internet. These range from images of human bone to landscapes on Mars.

When putting the images together for the exhibition, I experimented again with the idea of tiling, repeats and patterns and came up with another series of surreal combined images.

Do we all use the same mechanism to ‘read’ these kinds of pictures? What changes when we know the scale of the pictures? Can we be tricked by them? How does our brain work when dealing with these pictures?

With these questions in mind, I used heat to shrink, distort, manipulate and mould the material to create unique and abstract compositions.