Artist Statement 

Exhibition Art & Computers

These works deal essentially with the problems of transferring and transforming images drawn on the computer to other media. I work in a variety of media – paint, printmaking (photo-etching and linocut). stained glass and clay, the last providing me with an opportunity to work out in a three dimensional form images based on my computer drawings.

I like to draw freehand on the computer combining those images with the formal structures that most software programs have. Using the computer with its built in constraints results in the creation of an artificial space which is different in feel to paintings based on direct observation where the space surrounding the object provides a continuous structure for the whole image. And it is this manufactured space that for me distinguishes computer based art.

ln the Angry Sphinx I experimented with the combination of a free hand image overlaid with a formal structure which was based on a totally different abstract design drawn on tbe computer.

The manner in which some colour printers express colours in terms of patterns rather than regular sized dots affects the density of tone either providing solid blocks or open chainmail patterns into which the drawn images can slide, stand out or disperse. In Walking Figures I was interested in how colour parterns could effect the solidity of the figures and I further used only two of the four colour separations obtained from the original drawing to establish form. It is relatively easy to produce an abstraction based on a freehand drawing in this manner and keep both freehand and formal marks in the final product.

Stained glass seems to me a natural medium for translation into computerized design with an emphasis on the problems of tonal variation. I find using a computer exhilarating and a stimulus to thought.

• Phillippa Egerton spent her childhood in East Africa. History Honours degreee from Oxford University. Higher BTec at Chelsea School of Art at Limegrove. Self-employed, freelance design, printmaking, clay, painting and stained glass. I retain the use of computer facilities at Limegrove.