Karin Elsu – Portfolio

Posts from the ‘Canvas’ category

Man’s Burden

What do we carry and how do we carry it?

We all carry something – bags, water bottles, scars, excess weight, tattoos, emotional pain. Some of what we carry is evident as they are physical objects but the rest we can only speculate about.

With this body of work my intention is to focus on what people physically carry but to encourage the viewer to look deeper. I chose to make the images faceless as faces often draw our attention. My aim here is to look beyond facial expression.

We all have preset notions about a person from the way they look but often these notions tell us more about ourselves than about the person we are looking at. By considering what clues to the personality we can glean from just looking at the center of a person, what they carry, and how they carry themselves we might gain an insight into how we view ourselves.

Canvas work

A majority of these works play with reality. What is reality? When does our concept of reality slip? It will be different for each person, as I guide you on a journey from definately real to definately not real.

Common for these works is that they are all series of four letter sized photos mounted on painted canvas (size 60 * 60 cm) with a cross stitch in each corner. The background of the canvas is painted with acrylic paint and the border (not seen) is gold.

The photos are cut out by hand and so no two prints can be the same. Several of the works include painting on the photos, gluing parts from other photos, dripping water, etc.

(Click on the i in the top left hand corner of the images to get the titles displayed)