Samantha Nolte-Yupari
Art Work
One of the best pieces of advice I ever had about drawing people was to make one edge of the plane defined and let the other fade away around the contours of the body. I may know one contour of the map, but must let the other parts be open to ambiguity, to questions—to discovery and rediscovery. Our bodies are the site of our engagement with the world. Bodies are maps. Maps document our movement. We embody our experiences.
I am interested in pathways, in line, movement, in interaction.
My work is currently about three art making processes. First, my map works are mixed media contemplations about experiences of place, and how maps are pathways of movement through them. As Tim Ingold calls hand drawn maps, “gestural reenactments of journeys actually made.” My own map works employ maps, some hand-drawn, some recycled, some inspirational, to act as a catalyst for reflection and making.
Second, l focus on line and layer, movement and palimpsest. Bones are architecture and the body is a landscape, with the layers building up as I engage with the body and my knowledge of it over time. I draw with lines and fields of color made up of lines because those lines, finding edges of bodies and movement in the body, help me to map my knowledge of the body and find the edges of that knowledge as it changes and rediscovers itself over time. Drawing is a path to discovery.
My collages, too, are the visual manifestation of the process of discovery of small spaces, miniature, tiny landscapes. I find the edges of a map. Each tiny landscape is a moment on the map, layers of the landscape that invite my movement through it and capture the tiny pathways of my thoughts.