Golnaz Taherian | Arts Editor
Featured Image: Ferragina and Williams combine printmaking and drawing to create unified pieces of art. | Golnaz Taherian
York visual arts students, Kathryn Ferragina and Olivia Williams, present the exhibition ‘Growth & Decay’. This exhibition explores how people are connected to, and affect the natural world. Located at the Special Project Gallery of Joan and Martin Goldfarb Centre for Fine Art, the exhibition juxtaposes artificial and organic elements, and in so doing, showcases how they reflect and manipulate one another.
The inspiration behind the artists’ mutual work stemmed from the similarity of their styles. Both Ferragina and Williams are influenced heavily by natural imagery. With the former focusing on printmaking and the latter on drawing, they combine these two mediums to create unified and expressive pieces of art.
In one collaborative installation, a tree trunk rests on a crate. There are nails, a flashlight and a stone beside it. The contrast between these various objects sharply highlights the manufactured aspect of the piece.
The exhibition’s title and the artist’s initials are carved into the trunk. This element adds a human touch to the piece. As Ferragina points out, the carving is a “direct disruption” of nature through human intervention.
In another piece, Williams has drawn several nails on a sheet of paper. Ferragina has added a golden thread to the piece as her reaction to the nails. The thread is done with screen printing. When asked about this process, Ferragina replied: “I drew it on a tracing paper and exposed it with the screen covered in emulsion. I then washed it out, lined up my paper, put the ink on my screen afterwards and pulled it through.”
Williams’ purpose in drawing nails was to demonstrate their hardness and usefulness in connecting things. Ferragina’s thread is similarly connective, but is of a lighter and softer material.
One of Williams’ works portrays a large installation of different natural objects. These objects are portrayed in a somewhat ethereal manner. When asked about the inspiration behind the painting, she replied: “The inspiration was looking down at the surface of the rock, then I ended up including all these elements and it became abstract.” Her work is grand and extremely detailed, requiring focus to wholly absorb it. Williams notes that the black and white character of the artwork opens up the field for subjective interpretation.
Another of Ferragina’s pieces features five close-up pictures of lichen on rock. The detailed textures of the lichen, as the artist notes, are reminiscent of acid colours.
Her work was made by screen-print design. First, she used photoshop to separate the colours into cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK). Then she exposed it on the screen, layered them and built them up to create the photo. The original photo is done in CMYK, while the other ones are manipulated. Ferragina stretched them to give them their blurry aspect, and increased the saturation to expose the details.
Ferragina advises aspiring artists to: “Go for it. Push yourself to your limits, but remember you have support around you, so you shouldn’t doubt yourself. Part of becoming an artist is being able to be critiqued, and that shouldn’t scare you because in the end it will benefit you.”
Williams adds to her partner’s positive attitude, stating: “Make as much as you can, and don’t worry about it being perfect. If you make something that sucks, it doesn’t matter because it’s just a stepping stone to get to the place where you want to be.”
