Gerda Teljeur moved to Ireland in 1967 after studying at IVKNO [now Rietveld Academie], Amsterdam, and now lives and works in County Wexford, Ireland

Her last Solo exhibition Like Life Itself was in the Wexford Arts Centre 2013. The drawing installation comprised of 300 pen and ink drawings produced over a period on one year.

‘Teljeur’s work is significant influenced by the landscape. Whilst producing this series of works the artist travelled between Ireland and the Netherlands, and the work subtly registers the difference between the two countries; the closely compacted and controlled Dutch landscape contrasting with the relatively unrestrictive spaces to be found in Ireland. A sense of landscape resonates as oppposed to being explicitly expressed and the artist works with negative and positive spaces to build rhytmic areas of light and shade.

As with Teljeur’s previous work, the exploration of line and space is the material through which other subjects are meditated on or felt. Independent op any reasoning process, the artist adopts a technique which is similar to the act of free form writing. At the beginning of the twentieth century, writers chose to use non-traditional methods of describing phenomena and give a free flow to their emotions. A stream of consciousness was a narrative mode adopted to portray the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the  mind. The term was coined be philospher and phychologist William James in The principles of Psychology (1890), and James Joyce, a chief proponent of this style used this devise to the inerior monologue of his characters, instead of rendering them in an objective, external portrait. The use of run-on sentences without punctuation or editing is akin ot Teljeur’s explorations with line. The drawings serve to integrate and  touch upon the hidden activity of the subconscious and in doing so form a astract language. The artist’s repetitive and cumulative process of drawing interrelates with the way in which thoughts and memories occur, and each work has the potential to evoke a complex range of emotions’.

Catherine Bowe, Visual Arts Manager, Wexford Arts Centre, 2013