Intimacy and Power, Grow Tottenham, London

My practice of painting and mark making can be broadly understood as abstract and figurative, expressive and surreal. I am drawn to fragmentation as it constitutes a three-dimensional quality, a pulling apart of the everyday and putting it back together. 

 

Henri Lefebvre wrote, in the Production of Space, that: “Everyday life, as a social reality, is also a sequence of spaces, of which each fragment obeys its own laws, but which can always encounter and interpenetrate one another." Through the language of cubism, paintings can take on a spatial quality and open themselves up to new meanings. Through the integration of recognisable ‘fragments’, the moving parts of a body, an ear, eye, nose, hair, hand, foot, (which obeys its own laws) the space of the painting can function as the site of encounter where parts interpenetrate, gaps are left, the eyes create the flesh they want to see. The recognisable fragments form motifs, they are missized and misshaped repeated and overlaid, they can create a surreal quality. I paint in warm, joyful and vibrant colours, with fast expressive strokes to capture the intensity of a moment, a hyperbole, a cascade wrapped up in an image.

 

I am intrinsically unprecious about the work I produce. If I don’t like it, I paint over it, but I don’t create a faux white canvas to do so. Rose Macaulay writes in The Pleasure of Ruins: “Decaying buildings, with their gaps and eroded edges, present a raw and authentic beauty that new constructions cannot replicate.” I see the ‘original’ painting as a found site, an overgrown ruin which I can choose to reveal or conceal with my new acts of mark and image making, of imposition of a new order. Working with, and not against, the value of something I formally disliked breeds a new kind of love. The textures from below that come through, the colours I no longer use, the body fragments of another, the marks I am not in the habit of making, the colours that interact in strange ways with my new colours. It is a synthesis of what I wanted to say before and what I want to say now. I find myself attempting to balance the newfound chaos of the composition, having to make bolder moves, bolder decisions. I cannot make these layered compositions intentionally. I have to wait until I make something I dislike enough to loose it forever. And in those moments don’t feel sad, or angry, I just wonder what they will become.  

 

The paintings are abstract but also figurative. I find that the use of a figure, however abstracted, invites a sense of empathy and intimacy between the subject and object, the viewer and the figure. When I look at paintings I am drawn in through their unsettling body language, the confrontational look in their eye, the tilt of their head, the looseness of their limbs. If there are multiple figures how do their bodies interact, what is the intimacy or distance between them? 

 

Are we intruding on them? Are we invited in? The figure is my way into the feeling. The essence of a person or a scene, a moment, a memory. It is a way of making something psychologically tangible, relatable, even slightly. Each time I paint something, different people see themselves in the figures. The abstraction offers an openness to interpretation of gender, sexuality, site and even non-human forms.