Visual Artist, Educator

The project A Field (of Interconnected Realities) began as a performative installation involving live drawing sessions that re-enacted and reinterpreted sections of Max Ernst’s 1934 collage novel, Une semaine de bonté.

Working simultaneously across two continents, Paula Roush, situated in Queen Elizabeth II Square in Auckland, New Zealand, and Maria Lusitano, based in Malmö, Sweden, collaborated through webcams to create an interconnected drawing process inspired by Ernst’s surrealist imagery.

The project subsequently gave rise to an academic paper presented at the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), Istanbul, in 2011, as well as an installation and artist’s book presented at BOOKLIVE!, held on 9 June 2012 at London South Bank University.

By placing drawing within a disruptive and experimental context, the project challenged the conventional characteristics and boundaries of the medium. It brought the dreamlike fantasies of the past into the present through the juxtaposition and recombination of Max Ernst’s imagery with contemporary visual material, while revisiting the historical tools and processes traditionally associated with drawing.

The glitches, pixelation and fragmentation of images generated through webcam streaming introduced a puzzling new spatial and temporal dimension to the experience. These technological disruptions became both a visual language and an interface for constructing a contemporary dreaming space, in which the resulting collages and drawings revisited and reimagined the collective unconscious, its fears, desires and fantasies in the context of contemporary life.