Peripheral ARTeries
Kalli Kalde (Estonia) An artist’s statement
Last twenty years I have lived in the countryside, in an old farmhouse in the forest and by a little lake, in the South of Estonia. The lake is the first thing I see in the morning and the reflections on the water still catch my eye for long hours. I have tried to capture the magic of my lake in my paintings. Laozi thought water was the most humble of substances, and its humbleness the most powerful thing in the world. Really, water has no colour, no taste, no form, thus it can take any form, reflect anything, be responsive to everything. In water, there is place for everything, looking at water, you see the sky, the trees, the sun and the stars. But you can also see yourself. Looking at water is a kind of a meditation, an encounter with yourself, with your emotions, thoughts, your past and present. All this is in yourselves: the sky, the clouds, the trees and the grasses swaying in the wind. The water, its ripples and waves are in yourself too. In my graphic art I like to play with photos and electrical schematics. Year after year the communication between people has changed to more digital. E-mails, communication networks, messages through computers and phones replace the face to face conversations, smiles, welcoming and farewell hugs. Every day we are digitally connected with people we have never seen in person. Information, emotions, even expressions of love move as sequences of numbers from one device to another, one person to another. Electricity switches on-off, black and white, like traditional graphic art, light and dark changes in eternal information flow. Nowadays there is another world beside the visible world - electrical field carrying information. Even seemingly pure and untouched nature and isolated places are filled with electromagnetic waves and information flood. In my pictures I try to visualize information field surrounding us. Also I have been inspired by cosmic literacy – the programming languages that allow us to teach satellites to see and operate. The th Estonian Student Satellite ESTCube-1 was launched on the 7 of May, 2013 to experiment with the solar wind sail. In my works I have played with the idea of the solar sail. Come to think of it all great space discoveries have probably begun with the childhood dream and an airplane folded of paper. Kalli Kalde 58
#196 Winter