Tattooed Heart

"Tattooed Heart, agitates the hackneyed symbolisms of tattoo and heart, focusing on the process of art making. Using the hand and it's lines as an index from deliberate crumpling of the   tracing paper, the works dwell on the elementary act of making, trapping actual shapes and applying colour. The folds of the tracing paper, being its fixed and final medium, are being   mended. It's an exploration of the whole fault line of abstract patterns and its temporary permanence from the continuous folding and crumpling of the paper, capturing precise and fixed moments.

From what seemed to be a rejection, a disliked work, these crumpled pieces are displayed alongside with the use of clasp hand(s) from human fat, creating an actual form of the heart. That, in itself, is an abstraction: it never was the shape of the heart as it is known and believed, trapped there somewhere,     and from which systems of connotations arise in things that remain permanent, excessive, and passionately obsessed.

How abstract can permanence be? Unknowingly done and undone, pieces of what seems to be scrap and spoilage can sever the formal in art. We are still left with the rhetorical  trope of who can and may create?"

-Stephanie Cabigao