‘Discretion’ plays with the patterns I found in scrunched up newspaper which I juxtaposed with the close up detail of a lace fan. It is complicated and intricate. I am forcing a comparison and meeting together of 2 very different types of objects, newspaper and lace and seeing those similarities between the creases, the marks and the material. Conceptually I like the play of the ideas of newspaper revealing information but in its brevity and selectiveness, also hiding as much as it reveals. Ditto with a lace fan, only certain information is revealed. So the imagery of the tactile and material physicality mirrors the thought behind the concept.
‘Fever’ grew out of illness. I had an infection and was definitely out of it when I started to put the piece together – circles within circles, circles within squares, squares within circles and so on. The idea of macro and micro, cosmos, atoms and amoeba being interchangeable with each other. I intensely disliked this piece as I was working on it. It seemed to clash and reverberate and drive me a little crazy. It was later when I looked at it, I realised it reflected my state of health at the time; a fluctuating shift between lucidity and being somewhere else completely.
How to explain the similarity between these 2 paintings? Well apart from the similar processes I use to produce them, both paintings are complex in their workings. Detailed in their imagery and focusing on patches of repeated pattern and in some parts obsession. Both also use conceptual analogy to parallel the visual representation.
