ARTIST STATEMENT

Erik Waterkotte 

Man looks at his world through transparent patterns or templets [sic] which he creates and then attempts to fit over the realities of which the world is composed.  The fit is not always very good.  Yet without such patterns the world appears to be such an undifferentiated homogeneity that man is unable to make any sense out of it.

George Kelly, The Psychology of Personal Constructs
                                                                                              

In a dialogue of drawing and collage I utilize diagrammatic language as an abstract vocabulary. This vocabulary is fashioned from varying sources such as architecture, physics, topology, and mathematical games.  I am interested in the functional role of graphic language, where information may take the form of readable data as well as a perceived image.  The diagrammatic scenes and schematics pictured stem from a continuous act of drawing and collage as expression and reconstruction.  The imagery appears as multiple layers of information that seem to simultaneously obscure and elucidate one another. 

From information to experience, plan to physical construction, the diagram or schematic acts as a visual tool, typically functioning in a linear sequence.  However, in my work, diagrams appear without a specific context, and therefore without any explicit sense of sequence.  By layering, overlapping, and deleting, I confuse the diagram’s ability to directly communicate and leave its proposition suspended.  Although sequence is suggested in the work, there appears no discernable beginning or end; and the imagery appears only to play between preceding, proposed, and anticipated stages.  In this way, I see the work presenting questions about human cognition and our expectations of information.