Painting (MA)
M. Jacinta Silva Armstrong
B. Valdivia, Chile (1988).
M. Jacinta Silva Armstrong is a Chilean artist. She completed a BA in Art in the P. Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago, where she lived and worked until moving to London to attend the Royal College of Art.
Recent shows in London include The Distance Between and SnapShot in RCA Hockney Gallery, and Final, Not Over in Unit 1 Gallery/Workshop.
Chile is a seismic country surrounded by mountain ranges. The topography of the territory is abrupt and rough. The Andes are an invariable, high skyline limiting the view. The landscape is a wall.
My practice starts from the paradox of inhabiting a space built on the latent possibility of destruction. My recent work focuses on finding non-linear ways to understand the concept of a mountain range and the isolation it implies, extended to other related topographies, such as islands and archipelagos.
I approach the painting practice as a position from which to learn and analyse the territory surrounding me. I exercise this as an active slowness: an effort to actively unlearn the world and look for new ways of organising it, according to my own measures.
I make visual essays that result in paintings, although lately I have been working on drawings and hand-bound books as well. I am interested in fragments, folds, translucency and blurriness as mediums to create fragile atmospheres and a distance within the image. These become a collection of exercises around an observation or wondering, to which an answer appears elusive and untranslatable into language.
