eliminating my map

Deborah Bell

By What Light Do We Really See?, 2012-2014

Alenka Sottler illustrates BAMBI by Austrian writer Felix Salten.

Alenka Sottler (b. 1958, Slovenia) was born into a creative family and began her art practice early on, as a child by the side of her father, an academic sculptor. Later she pursued her formal university education in Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana, at both graduate and postgraduate levels.

Alenka describes her technique:

"Essential for my creative process is the ability to use extreme simplification, which opens up surprising worlds and a space for creative play. I am lead by the joy of discovering the new, a respect for the material and its nature.

I produce seemingly extremely complex visual forms in an astoundingly simple manner. In my drawings I behave like someone who partakes in nature’s processes. I find an interesting abstract structure. I grasp its visual essence and its hidden logic. I add to it with its own laws of growth.

For example: What a beautiful trace a metal comb makes if you pull it across some fresh black paint on white paper. I understand that the strong impression is created by the multitude of parallel thin black and white lines, which wind across the surface of the paper. In this abstract space I see the scene. Using a brush, that creates the same fine lines in black or white paint, I add to the structure..., which then grows into a new organism—an illustration, and eventually into a book, perhaps. I begin from any kind of structure—see my letter illustrations for instance. In this process, I am influenced by the concept of evo-devo evolutionary developmental biology which is concerned with the formation of organisms. Recent discoveries bring to the visual world totally new dimensions and relationships between the large and the small. I see the world as a universe of giant forms, constructed from an endless amount of repetitious identical particles, rebuilt with the same meticulousness as the large ones, and I draw these through my illustration."

“I remember an incident from my own childhood, when a very close friend of mine and I, we were walking down the street. We were discussing whether God existed. And she said he did not. And I said he did. But then she said she had proof. She said, ‘I had been praying for two years for blue eyes, and he never gave me any.’ So, I just remember turning around and looking at her. She was very, very Black. And she was very, very, very, very beautiful. How painful. Can you imagine that kind of pain? About that, about color? So, I wanted to say you know, this kind of racism hurts. This is not lynchings, and murders, and drownings. This is interior pain. So deep. For an 11 year-old girl to believe that if she only had some characteristic of the white world, she would be okay. [Black girls] surrendered completely to the master narrative. I mean the whole notion of what is ugliness, what is worthlessness. She got it from her family, she got it from school, she got it from the movies — she got it everywhere; it’s white male life. The master narrative is whatever ideological script that is being imposed by the people in authority on everybody else. The master fiction, history, it has a certain point of view. So, when these little girls see that the most prized gift that they can get at Christmastime is this little white doll, that’s the master narrative speaking: “This is beautiful. This is lovely, and you’re not it.”