EDUCATION
Wimbledon School of Art,
BA(Hons) Fine Art Painting,
1996 - 2000
Harrow College of Higher Education,
Foundation Studies,
1987 - 1988
STATEMENT
So-Ha Au has used diagrams in her work over many years, starting from palm prints, floor-plans, genealogy trees, to dressmaking patterns; to explore issues of personal histories, sites of 'memories', and 'mapping' identity.
The use of diagrams as motifs and symbols evokes 'home', domesticity, 'making', the body, location, absence/presence.
She has explored imagined/ 'unreal' 'maps', by deconstructing and transforming prints of dressmaking patterns and layers of objects, to create ambiguous 'maps' or 'spatial landscapes' evoking aerial maps as a way of locating and placing. Creating a sense of trying to orientate, but also the awareness of not being able to, but instead to displace. Presenting the absence of knowledge, what is lost and unrecoverable - places that cannot be visited, time that cannot be placed, but also the possibility of new geographies.
Currently, she is developing this idea of 'new geography' further in new work. Taking maps from the "A to Z" of London, removing certain man-made landmarks like roads and locating just the green spaces and waterways.