Orman’s practice involves mixed media, automatic drawing and lithography printmaking. She uses these materials to bring to the surface metaphysical issues and paradoxes. Archetypal experiences are drawn from her subconscious environment and translated through the metaphor of landscape. Orman’s artwork serves as a liminal space to explore the relationship between mind and Matter.
Within Orman’s work, she explores the question; ‘‘what is beyond the material surface of things?’’. Her work acknowledges an ecological melancholy in relation to Western contemporary culture’s estrangement from nature. As such, Orman draws uncanny, desolate wind carved landscapes and a glimpse of their forgotten history. Vortices of tempestuous patterns seek for an entrance way into an otherworld. Orman hopes that by viewing these drawings, the spectator would be reminded of something deep within themselves, something that is past the realism of literalistic and materialistic society.
Orman’s influence ranges from pre-Christian iconography to Neo-Romanticism, which she believes have significance in the collective psychic infrastructure of today’s society. The abstracted symbols and archetypes that are embodied in her work encompass the complexities and challenges in contemporary Western culture, that is largely driven by depression, isolation and the unconscious. Orman seeks to transmute these devouring energies, which estrange us from the otherworld. From the edge of life’s gloom into a nondual totality.
Lara Orman (b. 1991, Cape Town) is a Masters graduate from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee, this is her first solo show after being awarded the 2019 Arusha Gallery Award for her work in the 2019 RSA New Contemporaries exhibition.
