Rachel Busby

Signals / Sinals 2022

 

 

The origins of this installation of works comes from the International Code of Signals ( ICS).

ICS is an international system of signals and codes for ships to communicate important messages regarding safety of navigation and other related matters to each other using flags.

 

With no room for misinterpretation, these flags are clear, precise and can be viewed at distance to communicate with fellow ships.

 

Thinking about ourselves as a vessel, I wonder how best I can describe myself / ourselves.

“ How are you?” How am I?”

 

 

After spending the pandemic years communicating via video to my family and friends, this idea of distance, separation, isolation and mental health came to the fore front especially with a continent separating us.

 

Living in a traumatising and uncertain world of contagion, climate breakdown, rising costs, economy slipping, inequalities of colour, race, sex and gender its difficult to describe how one truly feels when there is so much external discord around us. Yet when feeling mentally challenged, we are always told the problem is within us.

 

My question is this:

How can you really describe yourself when your environment plays a huge part to your answer?

 

It becomes impossible to isolate mental health from out societal structures. From studying the work of Salvadorian activist and psychologist Ignacio Martin Baro, he was intent on crafting a psychology that is responsible to it's time, place and people.

 

With this in mind, my work plays on the striking symbols from the ICS but less sure, confused and by no means precise. The paint, weakly applied, lays bear a fragile transparency that exposes mistakes and changes. Always fluid, each work jostles with how one is told to feel, expected to feel, to how you actually feel.

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Individual works shown in installation. Each painting is 40 x 34 in / 100 x 86 cm.

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