University Art Gallery

Elements

• Artist Statements

This exhibition is a response to the concept of the elements, Earth, Water, Air, Fire and Aether, which dates back to pre-Socrates times and persisted throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, deeply influencing European thought and culture. This concept of essentially the same five elements, are similarly found in ancient India, China and Japan. The artists, Megan Sprague, Sally Tsoutas and Marilyn Walters explore the representation of these elements within contemporary culture as well as the interaction of human communities with them in their everyday material lives.

Megan Sprague's installation, Atlas Shrugged is comprised of 4000 human figures creating a map of the earths' land masses, emphasizing that humans are dependent upon it and each other for their own physical survival. The work is deliberately a floor piece, in a mandala like configuration to be viewed from above. In spiritual traditions, mandalas are employed for focusing attention within meditation practices, as well as establishing a sacred space. Sprague's work encourages us to contemplate and explore the being with community rather than thinking first from that of an individual.

Sally Tsoutas’, Flux images explore the four basic elements ,  earth, fire, water, air at a subatomic level. The idea captured within the work is that objects are not separate from one another or the whole, but are an accumulation of variously arranged subatomic particles, arranged at different densities and vibrating at different frequencies. Within her Time series, she has focused upon time and the way the four elements work upon each other within a single moment.

Marilyn Walters’ works are a celebration of water as the source of life arising from the pre Socrates idea of water as the first principle, the essential substance from which all life originated and to which it ultimately returns.