about the work
I employ a diverse range of media to investigate time in its relationship to lived experience. My work has been about restoration, investigating ways of halting the process of entropy that goes with the passage of time.
This work is based on a found collection of old holiday and family slides. Redolent of transience and loss, they can be seen as a poetic metaphor for memory, a vital but elusive property. The banal meets the sublime in these souvenirs of an unrecoverable past.
Their distressed condition not only reveals the passage of time, but also removes the image from its tie to a particular event. It enters the subjective space of the viewer’s imagination, and resonates with the viewer’s own memories and experience; memories that are constructed, on both personal and cultural levels, through a transformational process of selective repetition.
I am interested in how these images are further transformed by the means used to preserve or interpret them. A dialogue is set up between these prints and my paintings.
click on image to view slideshow
In these small, intimate paintings, built up by the use of resists and poured paint, perlescent fluids define form and add shimmer. The use of transparent pigments in a natural resin on a smooth white ground gives luminosity and gloss, while an element of disruption is retained in the image by splattering the paint, medium and solvents. Imagery and gesture combine in a visual language analogous to the process of entropy on the slide surface.
The inkjet prints speak a visual language which approximates to painting.
Photos taken at night reveal the unseen and develop the Romantic aesthetic of the slides. Taken using long exposures, they record the passing of time, as do my pinhole photos.
