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Ariana Luca is an emerging artist who recently completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at RMIT University. She works primarily in watercolour, gouache and pencil on paper, using collage and paper cutting techniques to create abstract compositions. Her work explores the fragmentation and distortion of forms and a juxtaposition between finely detailed drawings and fluid abstract gestures. Ariana's latest work for her solo exhibition Contingent Gesturesis a series of works on paper that explores the relationship between chance, spontaneity and control in my own drawing practice. Each drawing traces the physical process of formulating and composing an abstract drawing through both random mark-making and controlled actions. Through these works I aim to capture my own fluctuating levels of awareness as I create gestures somewhere in-between a conscious and unconscious state. For this series I worked with watercolour, ink, gouache, pencil and pastel on paper. Each action, from smudging pastel, carefully painting watercolour details or physically cutting shapes from the surface of a work, explores a different level of intentionality within my drawing practice. This series is part of an ongoing and self-evolving process that produces many iterations and repetitions of the same gestures and forms. I begin this process by drawing from a wide variety of source material including my own observational drawings of landscapes, abstract studies and spontaneous automatic drawings. Over time, I slowly manipulate this material through fragmenting it, redrawing the fragments and recomposing them into new iterations. In order to reveal new forms, I subject the drawings to methods that employ an element of chance, including using my non-dominant hand to draw or closing my eyes when creating the initial gestures of a composition. To subject the works to even more contingency I use a flatbed scanner to distort images. This process involves moving the works as they scan to create warped versions of an image which I can then work with. I am continuously gathering the material that results from these processes and using it to create new, unexpected abstract compositions. The resulting drawings contain imagery that sits somewhere in between careful and random, as each process and decision is woven together into a single sheet of paper. This body of work manifests my ongoing search for newness of form while indulging in a process of continually repeating and working through the same gestures.