Jestine Acebuche

Fine Art

Students on this course:

'Rooms That Haunt Me'

These rooms are semi-abstract containing a combination of fragmented memories to create a hallucinatory environment that shelters rooms of pain.

The process of creating the plaster rooms to me is symbolic- I reuse, tire out these cardboard boxes (that act as a mould) which with time and constant use, start to deteriorate, weaken and fall apart. I then try to mend again to create another plaster room and every time the outcome looks more wrecked. Through this process I accept its flawed aesthetic, I accept its natural quality, its rawness and imperfection. To me, the quality reflects the imperfection of the human condition which perfectly ties into my concept. There is something about the process of using this technique; there’s a sort of poverty, labour and difficulty that lives in the process; how my hands have to claw into the clay after the plaster has set; I feel as if I am digging up a room or a world which I have created and after digging up the clay, its colour imprints onto the plaster, adding to the aesthetic of dirt.

'Scratch'

In this piece, I was reflecting and deciphering my own identity and memories; I found myself creating my own territorial space, building an environment- my own land or my own world where I am able to express and consolidate myself as an artist. In my work, I am constantly trying to escape but dwell on my memories about family, growth, trauma and expressing alienation through writing on bin bags which I cut open to artificialise by painting childish colours over its original black colour- I found this process symbolic of trying to rummage through the attic to find a binbag or box full of abandoned memories which parallel to cutting open a binbag to reveal abandoned memories by looking into diary entries but rewritten through child’s play crayon writing.

'Prop Room'

Lost Space (A sneak peak of the physical exhibition)

'An Embryonic Journey'

'Cradle Me'

'It's Not Supposed To Be There'

Jestine Acebuche

From a painter progressing into an installation artist, I became immersed in the process of creating my work. I feel the physical need to express and to document the impact of human memories- recreating and reprocessing them through art.

I explore the human condition; specifically memory, deciphering my own identity and memories by looking into stories of growth, trauma, femininity, family, social systems and fathoming the subject of identity. I create environments that collate all these themes, territorial spaces which inhabit my semi-abstract memories that are interpretations of how I have processed them which include intimate narratives and personal writing or visionary of what atmosphere/ environment these memory rooms hoard in my head. I see my work as a mental depiction of the fragments that I call my identity, my perception of memories and the condition of what it is like to be human. The process of building a room to me is symbolic. I am trying to claim a space, for just a moment, to present a story that I want to show an audience. I want to create an experience for the viewer to be fully engaged in an impactful emotional environment, to capture an alienated location that expresses a need for space in the world. “Our past is situated elsewhere, and both time and place are impregnated with a sense of unreality. It is as though we sojourned in a limbo of being.” (Gaston Bachelard, 1958).

The process of deconstructing and reconstructing memories is significant in my work- this includes the alternation and the combining of different objects from different memories which relate to my installations. In preparation for installations, I use a range of media such as collage to experiment on different ways to display and provoke dislocation in my work, but these collage pieces are individual works themselves. I use projection of images and coloured lights to blur reality and unreality to put such environments into a liminal state.

Final year project

The Human Condition: Memory Accumulation