Demetra Cuschera

 

 

Fragment of industrial

Fragment of systems

‘Mimesis holds the meaningful world together’

Fragment of observation

Fragment of the thing itself

Fragment of the shattered wall

‘And monochrome is the nemesis of mimesis’

Fragment of home

Fragment of surface

Fragment of connection

‘The blankness that is usually understood to signify background.’

Fragment of material

Fragment of economy

‘Ways in which monochrome acts as a perpetually reappearing embodiment of chaos is in the fact that it seems to resemble, mimic or represent nothing’

Fragment of rejection

Fragment of landscape

‘Monochrome would appear to have more in common with the map.’

Fragment of hardware

Fragment of software

‘Blank spaces are the ultimate found object’

 

Fragment of city

Fragment of today

Fragment of much too many

‘As the absence of all light, black represents the absence of sight’.

Fragment of absorption

 

(Angeline Morrison, “Autobiography of an (Ex)Coloured Surface: Monochrome and Liminality,” in Discrepant Abstraction, ed. Kobena Mercer)

 

Demetra Cuschera (b. Italy) is a visual artist whose works relate to the complexities of everyday environments through collecting, observing, and salvaging discarded materials, from overlooked and transitional spaces.

Location is her crucial starting point. Having lived primarily in urban environments and villages with surrounding intermediate landscapes, she is drawn to sites often considered peripheral or “blank”. Sites where materials that have lost their intended order linger. Discarded metals, construction waste, and found objects remain suspended between use and obsolescence, carrying traces of the systems, histories, and the labour that produced them.

Working across weaving, drawing, mapping, assemblage, and material investigation, she moves between the abstract and the personal, the handmade and the manufactured. Through these processes, she brings disparate elements into relation, questioning linear narratives and fixed classifications of place, movement, and material economy.