Zara McQueen
Works 2021-2024
BUMF Gallery AUB 2022
I am a visual artist living and working in North Dorset. I have been drawing and painting in my rural environment for many years. Studying for an MA in Fine Art has recently led to a more personal reflective, investigative practice. A career in therapeutic and child protection Social work, underpins my current work. I am utilising the Genogram model, embedded in Family Systems Theory, to tell stories.
‘Genograms’ map behavioural patterns in simple signs and symbols. They make complex human relations readable. I started my studies expecting to move away from autobiography as a methodology, but the opposite has happened. I have dug deeper into my own story and in doing so, significant themes have emerged.
My aim is to reach beyond my individual experience to articulate matters symptomatic of wider socio-cultural systems. I know that whatever has happened to me, happens to others everywhere, every single day. When I consider this in the context of my practice, I question if a graphite drawing with coded signs and symbols or an upside-down chair can ever be enough. I have a need to make art, so for me it has to be.
Chairs
An interest in chairs came unexpectedly one afternoon in November 2022 on site at
AUB (Arts University Bournemouth).
My intention that day was to arrange sixty years of personal papers, letters, photographs,
poems, diaries etc and make them into a genogram on the the studio floor. I couldn’t do it. It was too much.
I noticed the chairs pushed against the walls; a mix of brightly
coloured plastic university chairs, marked with paint and studio life. I began
to move them around the room. These functional splattered pieces of furniture
transformed into me and my family. It was a powerful and unexpected excercise.
Studio Notes
Who are they?
Why this chair?
The natural endpoint always seemed to be a book
The book is available as a limited edition of 50 and will be signed and numbered and available from the exhibition while it is on. If I have any copies left after that I will make them available online for those who can not attend.
