Seeliger, Tristesse

Lives in Vancouver, BC

Artist Statement

Tristesse Seeliger’s multimedia artworks include collage, painting, murals, and sculpture. She predominately explores the ideas and metaphors around mapping as a tool of perception and orientation.
 
To Learn Something By Being Nothing
These paintings are the first in an ongoing series entitled To Learn Something by Being Nothing, inspired by rivers. The title is from Mary Oliver’s poem Entering the Kingdom, where the poet lays down beside a slow river to learn by listening and observing. Seeliger explores the river as a metaphor through abstraction of the form zooming in and out of the landscape. The visual similarity between a river system, seen from above, is like looking at the human vascular system, brain matter, or lungs. This visual connection can also be seen in the natural world when looking at tree branches, coral, and leaves. The river is a metaphor for time and change in literature and folklore. The river is a fertility symbol because of the abundant life that can thrive there. Rivers mark boundaries and are in-between spaces, symbolically like crossroads, train stations, wall cavities, and thresholds. Where rivers meet each other, this is a sacred space, a portal to another world.