From My House to the Flop Haus
Kory Twaddle
Acrylic, marker, pastel, graphite, charcoal, conté crayon, glitter, and glue on card stock, yarn, and marker on mylar. 2021
My artworks are records of the lived moment, of specific periods of time and particular places, of my own life. In my drawings and paintings, I consider how I move through and between my most-used locations including my studio and home, as well as how these routes change me. This site-specific work, From My House to the Flop Haus, documents and abstractly maps my route from Orange, California to the current location, the InsideOut at the Flop Haus. The surrounding area is also represented in the piece including walks and locations visited during my stay on-site. The largest figure is the house itself, with the glitter designating the InsideOut window.
Multi-sensory information is used as navigational markers as we make memorable associations to find our way, and this is recorded in my work through mark making and color. Once learned routes become memory, we begin to use proprioception, or body memory. The body’s sense of its own parts and their locations relative to each other and surroundings, as well as memorization of repeated familiar actions, is heavily relied upon in navigation. The memorized walks and drives are what become the foundation of my lived diagrams. The line repeatedly walked becomes the basis of each of my works. The familiarity and physicality of the subject inform my work with a biological and cellular visual language.
Similar qualities are shared by buildings and bodies, and rooms and organs. Both are defined by membranes that take in and let out substances. Architecture and bodies both house unique selves and have systems to keep the whole going. Organs of the body and rooms of the house are similar in that they serve specific functions within the whole of the body, with particular materials. Arteries and blood veins appear in my work as moving pathways in the body between locations, just as roads carry goods and supplies. My work presents the body and its innards in an abstracted and playful way in efforts to examine how the body and the spaces it inhabits are intertwined both in reality and as conceptual architectures of the imagination. We can all identify with organic forms and have that in common that we are all inside our physical selves relating to the outside world.
In diagramming my daily life, I understand how specific locations have unique attributes, and I hope my work encourages others to appreciate their surroundings and to en-joy the visual experiences around them. In the process of investigating my interactions with space, I seek new windows into how people experience environments. My work is imaginary in that it is based in perception, cognition, and symbolism, without allowing cognition to be first among equals.