India Nielsen

India Nielsen creates and exhibits work across a wide variety of media. Her works are primarily interested in the dogmatic problem of language as a representational tool. In our increasingly virtual world, the source of an image has become near impossible to trace. The entity of a thing, it would seem, now lies entirely in the language used to represent it. Once this language has been unpicked we discover that it is a straw man - a Frankenstein’s monster given vitality through the stitching together of dead flesh. Nielsen’s work stresses this issue. Her work exists in a kind of loop. She deconstructs language, digging behind it seemingly in a ritualised attempt to get to the underlying ‘thing,’ but finding nothing. In the process of unpicking and deconstructing visual languages, she then begins to stitch them together into a unified living form. Her paintings combine a variety of these rendered languages that come together to vibrate on different registers, but within a single unified body of the work. Through this process, Nielsen is effectively constructing her own mythologies. She is no longer trying to follow the chain of images back to their provenance in the ‘natural’ world but instead employing the formula of myth to construct her own world.