Angela Driscoll

Angela Driscoll is a visual artist who explores time and narrative while creating visual and audio work from collected data. Her body of work includes artist books, drawings, installations, video, and sound. Angela received her MFA from The University of the Arts in Philadelphia in Book Arts/Printmaking. She currently lives and works in New Orleans, Louisiana, where she is an active member of Press Street’s Antenna Gallery, a non-profit collaborative project space, and co-founder of SIFT, an interdisciplinary arts organization.

Artist’s Statement

I am drawn toward information systems pertaining to science and I often use them as a starting point for my work. Closely examining minutia within these systems, I compare similarities while contrasting changes over time. Over the years, I have also had a particular interest in explosions and volcanoes.

Sticker dots are one of my go-to materials; books are one of my go-to structures. Combining these in a series of mail art pieces allowed me to repeatedly explore radiating structures. Eventually these radiating structures became short experiments in animation.

Blog Drawings are a series of works on paper and artist books that use a code (slashes, circles, and lines) developed from specific blog entries using grammar as a key. The format of the artist book led me to investigate narratives based on stories within blogs. Using the system I developed to represent the blog data, I visually attempt to get at the core essence of the narrative elements through abstraction and sequence. These narratives each contain two elements that oppose one another. It is not always apparent who the winner is within the sequence of events. In many cases, the participants are not aware that they are competing. In the artist book, The Beast versus the Underwater Volcano, the volcano is unaware that there is even a competition but is instead participating in a larger pattern that continues with or without the presence of the beast.

The graphite drawings in Ash Column reference still frames of an eruption of Anak Krakatau in Indonesia’s Sunda Strait. The volcanic eruption is a violent act. In these drawings, the eruption is prolonged in an effort to create a greater understanding of its movement. Each drawing is created through graphite rubbings of small circles. This repetitive mark accumulates and then reveals the structure within the column of ash. It is through this sequence of images that the minute structural changes of the column become noticeable. Time is expanded in order to focus our attention on small moments within monumental events.

I draw out moments in order to study individual parts. The element of time ties my work together–a sequence defining both the repetitive mark making and the narratives.