Imprint

Illuminated intentions the art of Cecilia Westerberg

by Kate Gorringe-Smith, acting editor, IMPRINT

From 27 February to 15 March this year, Adelaide Festival of the Arts presents one of the most complex art exhibitions it has ever attempted to stage. Blinc, an international digital art exhibition, features over 30 digital artworks from 18 international artists and collectives and involves live performance and audio pieces delivered in conjunction with video, 3D motion graphics, animation, mapped projections, LED installations and 30 watt laser lighting! Blinc will turn buildings, bridges, trees, a waterfall and even the surface of the river into canvases for digital art.

Cecilia Westerberg, The King, 2011, digital 2D animated projection, 3 minutes. Sound: Solveig Sandnes.

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ne of Blinc’s exhibiting artists is Cecilia Westerberg, whose practice is solidly grounded in works on paper. I wondered how an artist who paints, collages and makes beautiful artists’ books came to be projecting digital line-animation onto a footbridge waterfall over the Torrens River in Adelaide. The answer lies in a love of narrative.

When I asked Cecilia to describe how she came to introduce light and movement into her practice, she wrote: I attended art school in Copenhagen, Denmark and in London. The first couple of years I struggled…to find a way to embed an unfolding narrative in a single image. Transitioning into…animation and artists’ books solved that problem for me. Animation provided me with as many

frames as I wanted to develop a narrative structure, and artist books gave me unlimited pages and spreads to work within.

I call my animations drawings that move because I still think of them as drawings, and my approach to the process is very much like drawing on paper. It is very important to me that the lines used in my animations have some of the same quality as the images I draw on paper…I often use white lines on black because the black erases the square-shaped background when you project the image. The white line frees the drawing/animation from the background and makes it easier to merge with a real-life environment.

My ideas come through best in animated and site-specific drawings, as well as in my

Cecilia Westerberg, River Creatures, 2015, 4 minutes, digital 2D animated projection.

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beloved medium – the artists’ book…I have experimented with different formats: small and big, flip-books and pop-up books. I have made a handmade and oversized artists’ book called The Atlas of Small and Large Observations. When this book is exhibited, an animation is projected onto its pages. A dragon walks over the pages as the viewer turns them. So far I have published six books and continue exploring this medium.

My work is largely figurative and always has a narrative. Depending on the exhibition and the venue I’m working within, I choose a medium that best illuminates my intentions.

Drawings fascinate me with their possibility for direct communication, for easily revealing the time used on making them and for the sensitivity of line.1

Cecilia Westerberg, Atlas of Small and Large observations, 2013, Artist's book with animation, 70 x 50 cm, 16 spreads with original drawings.

Exhibition view.

Cecilia Westerberg's illuminations will feature as part of Blinc in the Adelaide festival of the Arts, 27 February – 15 March, 2015.

Andrew Lavery Takete 2004, blown glass (detail) Barbara Hanrahan Girl with a bird on her head 1989, linocut (detail) Dorothy Napangardi Sand hills of Mina Mina II 2002, screenprint (detail) Leonard French Toorak ceiling 1976, dalle de verre, resin silicone (detail)

Blinc’s first manifestation was in 2012, in the 13th century walled city of Conwy, North Wales. The festival’s curators, Joel Cockrill and Craig Morrison, asked artists to create works exploring the role history plays in today’s modern environment. For Blinc 2015, Cockrill and Morrison visited Adelaide twice to map the area and commission site-specific works.

For Wales, Westerberg created a sitespecific line-animation called The King which was projected onto the walls of the 700-yearold Conwy Castle. The animation depicts the ghostly figure of King Edward I, who built the castle, trying to re-enter it by scaling the walls. Time and again he climbs and falls.

Westerberg writes, ‘There is a paradox in that ghosts are said to be able to go through the wall [yet he] cannot. Not being able to enter

serves [to illustrate that] you can never go back in time, to the way things were.’2 In Adelaide, Westerberg has created another site-specific line animation. While Westerberg’s animation of The King is reprised for the festival, fittingly on King William Street, her new work, River Creatures will be projected onto the ‘waterfall’ at the end of the new footbridge in Elder Park.

Of her new work, Westerberg writes, ‘I was interested and intrigued by the texture and mythology of water and wanted to use that as a part of the animated installation…So I came up with the idea of a creature who lives by the bridge and only surfaces on the waterfall at night. The piece will be a digital white-line animation on a black background…I have been inspired by an image of a beast with an open mouth – which could be the whale-monster

Leviathan or the entrance to Hell envisaged as the gaping mouth of a huge monster, very common in depictions of the Last Judgment until the end of the Middle Ages. The mouth is a portal to other worlds.’1 There is a magic to creating images of light, images that are there and yet not there. In Westerberg’s new installation, the mouth of the River Creature is ‘a portal to another dimension and allowing magic to flow through’.1 In Blinc, modern technology and artistry are combining to bring folklore and ancient tales to life. Now that’s magic. •

References 1. Email from Westerberg to the writer.

2. From Westerberg’s website: www.ceciliawesterberg.com

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