Katrina (photo right- credit 'Jocelen Janon - www.jocelenjanon.com')
was born and raised in Auckland, NZ in an academically
inclined and creatively supportive family. She has just completed her Bachelors
of Fine Arts Honours year at Elam School of Fine Arts, and is currently
completing the arts side of her conjoint degree with a major in Media Studies
and unofficial minor in English. She hopes to enter into a creative field next
year, job willing, perhaps in publishing, photography, or
film/television/theatre production design.She welcomes feedback and interest, and is contactable at K.v.Roon@gmail.com
Here is her artist statement:
I am a reader, in particular,
a lover of narrative. Though primarily a bibliophile, I love stories told in
any medium, and, as a result narrative has, and probably always will
have a profound effect on me and my practice. Currently an important aspect of my practise is the exploration of
text as a visual language, leading to an examination of its mediums
construction and material qualities. In our current climate we are so
overwhelmed by information that the intricacies of its delivery are commonly forgotten,
a pity as the medium is in control of the text; words and images are only ever
representations, symbols, and appropriations
of reality.
The death of the physical book
object has long been predicted but until recently it has not been a true
possibility. The information maelstrom we now find ourselves in forces the
evaluation of language systems, both pictorial and written, and our
relationship to them. As a result of this I believe we must evaluate
what is individual to each medium of reading - that can’t be easily reproduced
by any other. Digital texts have the
opportunity to be highly interactive and easily manipulated by the reader,
while hard copy texts are tangible physical objects that the reader can hold, touch
and observe the details in the ink and paper, greatly effecting the experience
of reading them. I believe that the
book-object’s greatest asset is its physicality, we cannot touch a digital
text, feel its weight and texture and its smell. Digital texts have a
weightlessness, unbound as they are to an tangible form; their lack of physical
presence has meant that the book form still persists and I think it will
continue to do so, for its sensory experience. The book object spends the mass
of its life as a souvenir of the reading experience, a trigger to a reality
that only ever existed in our imaginations; an emotional surrogate for unreachable
or unknown desires, that can displace us from our normal lives for a short
period.
This project started two years ago (and has now expanded into many
different mediums) through an exploration of book marking or rather dog earing
the corners of book pages, and how this alters and expands the physicality of
the book object. The very action of book marking is an interesting one, it
pauses the narrative, marking a point in time for a later return. The crucial
role of time in narrative drew me to Giles Deleuze’s theory of ‘the fold.’ The theory of an origami cosmos, where two
points of time can be folded together to meet; an appropriate theory to
consider dog earing through. In this project I have attempted to expand the condensed
physicality of the book; through patterns of repedative folds, to manipulate
the narratives internal time; in a manner that, with no additions, adhesives,
or irreversable changes, attempts to respect the materiallity of the book form
and the experience of reading it.
Katrina van Roon
8th
of August, 2012
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