Kirsten Baskett

Kirsten Baskett’s work is concerned with time and memory, traces and absence. She uses obsolete technology as her impetus; typewriters, cameras, audio and visual equipment, which has had a close human association and has developed a patina or emotional charge through intense, or prolonged use. The memories we hold are fated to become selective, fragmented and faded, so this work is in part a reflection of the need to capture and preserve a memory. Constructing and eroding the image using heliogravure, she creates a suspended moment, which floats between a conscious reality of the familiar and a subconscious dream world, of uncertainty.

Baskett is interested in the sense of absence and also the trace of a human presence that is left behind. This ‘Einfuhlung’ effect affirms the emotion and personality carried by the object through human interaction and she strives to draw it out through several stages. Each is devised to dissolve away the original form and materiality, until only the latent emotional energy, which it has absorbed, remains. These images are those residues, the husks of lives. The viewer is left uncertain as to whether the images are dissolving and fading away, or coalescing into being.

http://www.kirstenbaskett.com