Ramos’ artistic practice employs different media and performance related installations, with recent emphasis on printmaking. Her artistic language is stirred by socio-political situations and inspired by the works of Francis Alÿs, Alfredo Jaar and Doris Salcedo. Her practice aims to draw attention to the pain of others through evocations of imagination and memory.
Her research for the Alice in Wonderland series entailed finding images which portray children in conflicts and famines along with the exploration of Alice in Wonderland and fairytale illustrations. Using different etching techniques she layers and scratches depictions of these events onto copper plates in a sketch-like haze combining references intuitively. Here Ramos shows a fascination for the realm of the child, a playful up-side down world, in spite of its horrors and atrocities. With her etchings Ramos conveys the hardship of daily survival where abuse, terror and abandonment destroy innocence and any hope of a childhood.
For the Alice in Wonderland series she combines various traditional techniques such as hard-grounds, soft-grounds, and dry-point with the more experimental petroleum jelly method that resists paint on the plates. This blend of print techniques allows the synthesis and transformation of these narratives. Her abrupt painterly scratches convey the chaotic nature of her source material, the lie behind naivety and the obliteration of childhood innocence.
©Renée Pfister, 2015
Image size: H535 mm x W320 mm
Alice in Wonderland series, seven etchings on Somerset satin paper