Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

Ilona Gaynor is a transdisciplinary designer, artist and writer. Her research practice employs the language and methods from non-visual fields and enterprises such as law, finance and administration; in both their narrative representation and actuary functions as a mode of critical production. Her approach to research is presented through imagined propositions: models, rehearsals, diagrammatics, narrative structures, texts and film concepts that seek to expand definitions; asking questions by inhabiting and subverting form, context, reading and strategy.

While at Headlands

While at the Headlands I intend to work on designing a spatial and legal taxonomy for dead things: landscapes, animals, people, towns, light, suns etc. Using existing mapping, astrological (for the celestial) and urban planning techniques contingent to the those currently used by urban planners and previously historic architectural imaginaries of the 1960’s; I hope to draw attention to fault lines in utopian rhetoric–positioning it as a relic or ‘ghost’ of what should be in a colonial past. A critique demonstrated through design, visual and material constraints; features of a world that necessitates fantasy but acknowledging limits to this freedom through the exact planning, appearance, rigour and rules of this world, only not for the living.