My current work expands upon previous themes of human perceptions of time, place, memory and identity through the creation and layering of traditional and new media. In making and merging original paintings, drawings and photographs, I create multi-dimensional works that challenge fixed notions of time and place.
Distance and alienation have emerged as stronger and more obvious themes, and the subsequent and still-evolving body of work ‘Life, Twice Removed’ records these ideas in their layers of bodies and time. Multiple layers fracture and distort, or provide only subtle visual inconsistencies, leading to a sense of dis-ease, something off-kilter, imperfect; a world viewed through a distorted pane of glass or a cracked mirror. The implications of many bodies in a space, coupled with the visual experience of things being ‘off kilter’ force the viewer to consider these images in fresh and more sinister ways.
My working process is alchemical and serendipitous. I think of these works as ‘palimpsests‘: layers upon layers, partially obliterated, layered again, written and overwritten, with glimpses of other places, other times still partly visible.
In these layers lie the imprint of lives led, traces left, a sense of place that is felt rather than remembered. In the shadow of 2020, the layers trap and record a fractured world in time.
In 2020, we are living in a time of change: everything we take for granted is shifting, nothing is fixed, nothing stable. The visual confusions in my work document this.