Installations | penelope-anstruther

Telluric Installation

Sculptural Book Installation, drawings with clay ink, watercolour pencil, site specific charcoal and found objects, 56" x 32" x 4", 2022

Telluric is an installation of deconstructed books. It is comprised of drawings made with charcoal from the forests where I grew up in England, ink made from clay in my studio and found objects collected near my home. These materials allow me to connect and layer land masses. The drawings begin with rock observation, tracing partial elements and craggy forms. Using these land lines as the map, I work abstractly back into them. The work is an exploration of, landscape and rock formation altered through memory.

Waiting Watching Spiders Weave

Ceramic sculptures, mono prints, risograph book
989 Yerba Buena, Oakland, CA 8'x4', 2021

Waiting Watching Spiders Weave, is the final installation of works made while being Artist in Residence at Mutual Artist in Residence. I began this body of work slowly, after the California shelter-in-place order came down in the Spring of 2020. I wanted to make things that stretched out and filled time: something meditative and quiet. The process of hand coiling and weaving clay became a kind of daily rhythm, a way of grounding while the world was warping around me. I stepped back and watched my hands at work. The monoprints and woven paper pieces evolved as two-dimensional studies, exploring form flattened and physically pressed. Together the work functions as a visual and material record of those pensive studio days, interwoven in our isolation.

Lean Against the Wall

A site specific installation

Cedar Street Gallery, Berkeley, Ca 90"x30", 2021

Lean Against the Wall is a site-specific triptych made with found objects gathered on walks in Berkeley CA. These are pieces of billboard, paint peeled from the wall and hoops from wheels, all discards of a busy city that, isolated, hold a kind of disembodied potential. I find these remnants beautiful and hope that by leaning them towards each other they are able to express their own pared down narrative.

The Moon is a Mirror

A site specific installation

The Inner Room at Gearbox Gallery, Oakland, CA, 8ft x 8ft, 2020

The Moon Is A Mirror is a site-specific installation exploring real and imagined celestial bodies and their mythologies. Inspired by Italo Calvino’s writings, particularly Cosmicomics and The Cloven Viscount this installation explores a chimeric reflection of a studio cosmos. It is a quiet mirrored map documenting accumulation, creation and destruction.

Using only materials I had already collected I began to create a body of drawings built on the erased remains of religious and astronomical imagery. Scraps of past pieces became tightly knit spheres and the work began to orbit around itself, creating its own private and self-generative narrative.

Raised from Remains

A site specific sculptural installation

Prairie Ronde Artist Residency, Vicksburg, MI, 3000 sq ft., 2018

Created during my month long residency in an abandoned Paper Mill, this piece began with the re-imagining of an enormous industrial space with three permanent concrete pillars. Thought to have originally have held some form of paper finishing machine, they stood alone in the room: pre-existing pedestals. I decided to assemble my piece around these, building sculptures for them and creating an installation that radiated out. Using materials I found scavenging the Mill I made a number of hanging sculptures, make shift pedestals, and pedestal-based sculptures. Alongside these I made a process driven video, a table of contents and a number of works on paper inspired by my time there.

Plinthios Brokhos

A site specific body of work made for Derivation, a three woman show at

Grael Gallery, San Francisco CA 2018

Recently I was given pages from a book of String Figures and began taking inspiration from the shapes and titles of these characters. Delving further, I found that these have no known source, but seem to have sprung up concurrent, across the globe, going back to possibly the Stone Age. These forms had multiple uses: shamanistic ritual, story telling, medical knots, a written language (Quipus or Talking Knots) as well as a mode of expression, art and game playing. Although common across the world, the first person to document some of these was Heraklas, a Greek physician who, in his first century monograph, described String Figures used for surgical knots and slings. The first figure to be described was Plinthios Brokhos.

Paths to a Well

6x7ft

Diadem

11x6ft

Tallow Dips

3x4ft

Midnight Insight [What's Found Was Soon Forgotten]

Site Specific Installation, 40ft x 12 ft

Solo show at Artist Television Access, CA 2016

Shadows blooming / Emanating softly / Like darkness off the water

Searching for markers in an inextricable landscape through heuristic process and dream memory.

Structural Ghosts [Their Nails Like Fingerprints]

Site Specific Installation, 20ft x 10ft

Solo Show at The Central Saloon, Seattle, WA 2017

Nails form the structural integrity of our physical lives. Hidden, they enable and support the spaces we exist in yet as these spaces fall apart, are dismantled or abandoned, the structural matter is forgotten. Designed for purely utilitarian purposes, once discarded the nails are rendered useless: they have become structural ghosts.