Presence. Exploring how ambiguity and presence can create a unifying core for art practice - through an embodied engagement with digital and analogue tools

This research explores the creation of presence, both in process and outcome, through engagement with multi-perspectival ambiguity and a conscious intuitive engagement with digital and analogue tools.Humans are uncannily good at pattern recognition, but we often get this wrong as we try to understand the world. One form is Pareidolia – seeing patterns where they don’t exist, such as Jesus in a piece of toast. My art pushes into this realm, exploring ambiguity and unknowing, a uniquely human quandary explored in religion and by philosophers for millennia.This research develops a process for generating ‘perspectival ambiguity’ through the creation of gestural floor drawing. This ambiguity, I further transform into mixed media artworks through collaborative engagement with a digital cutting machine. By removing intention from this process, at both stages, and allowing for the artworks to emerge through conscious engagement with these tools, ‘presence’ can be generated. Through the perspectival ambiguity inherent in the artworks.The goal of this research is to create moments of contemplation and presence for viewers engaging with this series of artworks. My art seeks to share an experience of presence, allow for a recognition of unknowing, and connection to the human condition.