Text is fragmented, condensed and reconnected to create a new intelligence, another reality. Using oil on canvas, Cassiel creates incomplete images that parallel our subjective view of reality. As a process, the layered paintings are developed by fragmenting text into squares, making these into a passage and fragmenting this text into squares again. These are then interwoven during the photomechanical process of transference and painting onto canvas, to create intriguing works which shift in and out of comprehension. Every canvas cuts off the stream of words at its edges, so the whole picture can never be seen...meaning remains elusive.

 

“Commonly held assumptions about the nature of the world are partly arbitrary, partly conventional, often contradictory, only rarely based on verifiable tests, and even in the last case likely to change as scientists revise their premises, hypotheses, and techniques of observation. Successful works of art enhance, destroy, or transform common assumptions, perceptions, and categories, yielding new perspectives and changes insights, although they sometimes reinforce conventional assumptions as well. They can transfigure experience and conception, calling attention to aspects and meanings previously slighted or overlooked.” Political theorist Murray Edelman

 

“Art seeks out the edges of things, of understanding....It prefers the unfinished: the systematically unstable, the semantically malformed. It produces and savours discrepancy in what it shows and how it shows it, since the highest wisdom is knowing that things are pictures that do not add up.” Art historian TJ Clark

 

‘...one of the most promising artists on the British art scene, has been conquering the United States of America with her exhibition in San Francisco.” Cornwall Arts

 

Cassiel’s work is collected internationally.