Nadja Stamselberg

I am an artist, theorist and lecturer living and working in London. My art explores feelings of grief, loss, memory and fear of forgetting. It aims to recover, repair and restore what I have known in the light of what I have lost. By layering memories, experiences and materials I find meaning through process and think through creation. By suspending judgment and placing future self in a visual context, I look for counsel in the physicality of mark making and take ownership through adding and taking away, through destroying and building up. I do so through drawing, photography, print, sculpture and painting. Despite being personal these sentiments are universal and have developed against the backdrop of collective sorrow the world has been experiencing in recent times. 

Initially, I move between the analogue and the digital, taking photographs, printing, drawing, painting, and layering them, only to photograph them again. I use these methods to build my compositions and experiment with process. Drawing is at the heart of my practice. It is my comfort zone, an anchor that roots me in the present. Painting, on the other hand, is my nemesis. It’s what keeps me up at night, what encompasses and overwhelms me pulling me deeper and deeper in its vortex. Before each painting I am excited and petrified in equal measure. When painting, I play with surface and texture to create images that hinge between representation and abstraction eliciting an emotional response. Fearing being too literal, I am interested in depth and layering in contrast to flatness and void. My painterly aesthetic comprises mark making juxtaposed to the sheer materiality of the paint. My process is long, painstaking and meditative as well as raw, immediate and impatient.