Chin Keeler and Emma Tornero have been working collaboratively since 2004. Suspending their individual artistic vision and preconceived ideas in an animated dialogue of polar style. Both work on the same piece at the same time, intuitively sourcing imagery or deliberating on a concept or theme. In this way they create paintings and collages in which the impossible emerges as something perfectly natural, where characters play parts in an all-encompassing illusory world – a place of dreams, hallucinations and unkempt fantasy, inhabited by strange beings, beasts and insects living out their lives just beyond our peripheral vision.
They have begun focusing on a far reaching project that could take them well into the future called Ghostjumps and Wormholes. Ghostjump translates literally from the german 'geistsprung' indicating a freeform mental jump from one idea to another. Wormholes are hypothetical shortcuts through space and time. Ghostjumps and Wormholes is a metaphysical board game of infinite proportions, where snakes lead you to the improbable and ladders to the unlikely.
KEELERTORNERO have cast their pantheon of favourite characters and creatures in an epic soap opera in which seemingly unconnected events can be traced back to an unseen framework. Presenting story-lines of impossible geometry, they stage a theatre of illusions and trap doors, where a fisherman from the island of Terschelling can rub shoulders with John Wayne trapped inside the body of a stag trying to escape his future by becoming the son of Mies van der Rohe. Lovingly mopping up the cultural fluff from the sofa crack of their brains, they attempt to salvage the sublime from the ridiculous.
For some years now KEELERTORNERO have been trawling their vast collection of books and magazines for source material and inspiration, searching for the signs that will lead them down a wormhole and seeking the springboards which allow them to ghostjump to the next level.
For more info, visit:
keelertornero.com/
Lightbulb is a weekly series of short films by Stephenson / Bishop, talking to designers and artists about their processes, their inspirations and their workplaces.