About wildRose
Biography
Rose Petterson was born in Tauranga on the 4th of February 1985, she lived in Invercargill for 10 years and Dunedin for 10 years. At age 15 she moved to Dunedin where she attended Otago Girls High School. After completing seondary education Rose spent four years studying at the Otago Polytechnic School of Art, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art (BFA), majoring in sculpture at the end of 2006. And in 2007 completed a Certificate in Web Design from the Aoraki Polytechnic. Since graduating Rose has been working fulltime as a sculptor, exhibiting in numerous group shows and sculpture parks. Her future ambitions include designing and producing socially challenging film as well as continuing to make sculptural works of a large scale.
Artist Statements
My art practice has been dealing with the abstract concepts of light and dark with relation to their physical and invisible properties. This concern with light and dark has also led me to investigate ideas of transparency and the nature of opposites. I have become interested in the seen and the unseen, issues of the realm of the spirit, and also religious systems and symbolism.
I have explored these concepts in varying ways using various sculptural mediums. From the softness of wax to the rigidity of steel, I use solid materials in a way that speaks of both the abstract concepts of light and transparency, and also of darkness and density. The lightness of my work conveys a sense of space within the object or installation. I am interested in the concepts and the aesthetics of transparency, as a way of describing or giving reference to the nature of the spirit or invisible realm. Transparency does several things; it strips back excessiveness and unmasks deceptions that are concealed. Transparency creates vulnerability, it exposes what otherwise would be hidden. Most inherently it has the capacity to contain light.
I am interested in the duality that has to do with the illogic of two opposed parts classifying each other. Binary oppositions are represented as conflicting, but they only exist by virtue of each one defining itself against the other. There is no light without darkness, no darkness without light. In other words they depend on each other for description.
These theoretical concerns also present themselves in my other artistic mediums, wether it is in paint, or video, or installation, or photography or even in music.