Louise Schmid
Louise Schmid attended a residency at Cel del Nord in the summer of 2022 during which these eight works on paper and one on vinyl were developed. A visual artist born in Basel, Louise is based in Glasgow and more recently also on the Isle of Bute. She has been with Wasps’ since the 90s and has had a studio at South Block for over a decade. Since graduating from art college in Zurich in the 80’s, her preferred media has been work on paper.
Over this period, she has had a string of inter-/national exhibitions and residencies. Her visual motifs evolved, especially in response to working as an artist in residence, in diverse locations such as Tokyo, Paris, New York, Eire, Shetland and Reykjavik. This year she produced a new body of work during her residencies at Cel del Nord, and at Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris, focusing on the bio-food industry and eco-aesthetics.
Louise Schmid’s drawing process can be slow and involves numerous layers, transformations, remixes and visual mutations that evolve over long periods of time. A direct, comical drawing style often seems to belie the complexity of its subject matter. Working with condensed metaphors and elementary materials (pencil, acrylic, shellac, ink, wax on paper) aids reducing artwork to its essence, and transcending technical constraints. Her wall mounted installations consist of associative rhizomes. Louise Schmid ‘s drawings perform not as literal illustrations, but instead as condensed metaphors. Her aesthetic communication is deliberately ambiguous, to foster the use of different interpretative codes, by diverse audiences who may encounter this work.
