Elke Finkenauer
visual artist

Fractured Narratives is a body of work I made for the collaborative exhibition ‘Something to Remember’ with Alexis Neal. It was shown at Gus Fisher Gallery (2018) and The Suter Gallery (2019). We referenced Louise Bourgeois’s late artist books ‘Nothing to Remember’ and ‘Ode to Forgetfulness’, in which she refigures forms and memories. Through iterative processes, working with drawing, textiles, text, stitching, knotting,and printmaking, my series explores the overlapping themes of refiguring, aging and voice.

​

Created in my mid-40s, the series re-evaluates the aspirations of a younger, 1990s self: wanting a fancy car, a big house, and to be desirable. By the mid-2010s, practicing as an artist, I was wondering how to erode the insidious hold of these images.

At first glance my screenprints appear as objects of desire. On closer inspection they are layered and fragmented. Vibrant colours, saccharine palettes and cropped scans of straps, ribbons, and mesh are fractured by marks from drawings of aged skin. 

Silver foil text works convey a disconnect between what's said and unsaid. Window’, inspired by Ann Peebles' 1973 song ‘I can’t stand the rain’, depicts a form that is both inside and outside, a silent observer of all. ‘Debt’ was written using my phone’s predictive function. Even it had become infused with 1990s dreams.

Perhaps the most elusive works in the series are the blind embossments. Made through processes of inversion and removal, they suggest the possibility of breaking with stories that no longer serve us.