ARTIST STATEMENT
My painting practice explores concepts of memory, transition and emotion within a larger context of female identity and representation. Critically responding to historical female representation within the canon of Western art history, where women – predominantly painted by men – were represented as polished, contained and separate from their surroundings – I instead paint women fully immersed in both their physical and emotional environments. Sometimes flesh and blood, other times ghostly outlines – they become the fuzzy, porous boundary between foreground and background; past and present; memory and dream.
Using a formal language of pattern, colour, repetition and layering I create poetic narratives heavy with symbolism, where flowers embody feelings of absence and growth and rain clouds communicate emotion. Shifting into the realm of magic realism, these narratives – intimate, often nostalgic and heavy – are anchored to the physical world while simultaneously departing into the world of memories, dreams and hallucinations. As a backdrop of floral wallpaper becomes the textile patterns of a woman’s blouse and intricate dot patterns of a cloud slowly transition into tears, my aim is to present both the world and the body in a constant state of reshaping and transformation.