These paintings are based on images found from internet searches. It is important to me the places I paint derive from images I experience this way, rather than places I have actually been. This allows me, as the maker, to enter the space of the image in an imaginative and explorative way, as if for the first time. The alienation attached to my experience enables me to hold back my description of it; to say just enough but not too much. As a result, the painting hangs in the balance between representation and abstraction, between image and surface, solidity and fluidity. It becomes a kind of disintegrating hallucination. These dichotomies enhance the uncertainties already present in the image, concerning the function, condition and location of the subject matter. I have come to understand that these tensions, along with the types of images I choose, reflect my dislocated sense of belonging and express my own anxieties as a neurodivergent artist.
For me, the structural elements of the image provide necessary representational context in the form of a vaguely recognisable framework, within which the paint’s organic, material and happenstance properties can be allowed to disrupt and obscure. I think of it as a collaboration with the paint. I need to be present and responsive in order to allow the paint to behave this way. It is the balance between these unpredictable elements which keeps that dialogue alive.
On-going series…
