My work attempts to bring together ideas of traditional, expressive painting with contemporary processes and reproduction, to create an image that deals with both imitative depiction and abstract, gestural mark making. My paintings often play out as a battle between these two opposing concepts, encouraging the onlooker to question what they’re seeing, and explore surfaces that aren’t necessarily what they seem.
My work sets to critique the grounds of representation, commenting on ideas of appropriation, originality and imitation.
My paintings are about process and expression, yet I like to hide the process, and play with images that need unpicking. I aim to remove the evidence of hand-made gesture, leaving a painting devoid of any trace of human intervention, and denying it’s own physical presence. In view of this, I would like my painting to be seen or read as a photograph or digital screen.
My work also explores pink- a colour more closely associated with emotions that any other, and which directly impacts on our behaviour. The stimulating aspect of working with pink is it’s inherent ambivalence.
No other colour embodies such widely differing emotional characteristics and culturally encoded qualities. Nevertheless, in contemporary art, pink is not taken seriously. Colours play an important role in our daily life. it is society that defines colour, establishes it’s uses, constructs, codes and values, and determines whether it is acceptable or not. During centuries of fine art tradition there gave been many outstanding works that have drawn attention to the colour in a notable way, however, today, it is disregarded, and not seen as a serious, sophisticated colour. My dissertation is an exploration into these ideas.
