Riin Kaljurand
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Riin Kaljurand STATEMENT I was born in the former Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, that was a part of the Soviet Union. The era has always fascinated me with its paradoxes and peculiarities. Imagery of my paintings is taken from Soviet Estonia’s magazine Soviet Woman. According to the communist ideology of work and the importance of working, women in this magazine are represented as hard working comrades of Soviet society. Soviet Woman created and propagated femininity according to communist ideology. As Judith Butler has said, “Masculine and feminine roles are not biologically fixed but socially constructed.” My second interest lies in paint itself. Paint as a medium is as tangible and formable as clay and can be manipulated and approached as sculptural material. My paintings are collaged from dried layers of acrylic or household paint, which I manipulate by scraping, folding, cutting and building up the surface. Of personal fascination for me, beside its surface, is paint’s physical quality and its formability. Dried paint is highly flexible and formable and can be used in multiple ways. Some of my paintings are built up by collaborating collage techniques and traditional handcraft–knitting and basket weaving. Paint can also be manipulated in different drying stages. For example, a layer of acrylic paint left to dry overnight gives it a quality which allows it to be drawn into. Because I approach paint as sculptural material, I choose to hang paintings further from the wall to give them an object-like, sculptural format. They often take on three-dimensional forms with varying textures and colours. For me, paint is not embellishment on canvas, but rather a physical material in its own right. BIO Riin Kaljurand was born in Estonia and moved to Ireland in 2005. Kaljurand studied at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin and graduated in 2015 with a BA Honours in Fine Art, Painting. In August 2015, Kaljurand was awarded the Royal Dublin Society (RDS) Student Art Award, Monster Truck Studio Award. Since then, she has been working in the Monster Truck Studio and expanding her art practice. In her collages/paintings, she seeks to create a tension between the logic of “should” and the logic of “play”. She tries to use paint, not as it “should” be used, as a medium to be applied to a surface using specific tools, but as a formable, tangible, almost sculptural medium ripe for manipulation. ARTIST CONTACT [click to email] IMAGES
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