I havent quite finished thoughts about chairs..
Annabel Tilley asked if I would be interested in painting an 18th Century chair ( this is her area of expertise) and I said not at all. These modernist chairs were particularly symptomatic of my other fascination which I explored in my older works of 1950’s social housing and these chairs were about continuing that conversation in a different way. Modernism has been important to me in the sense of a utopian ideology…one aspect of which is that if we could change buildings and make them better for people to live in we could inherently change the people that lived within these spaces. The failings of these ideologies and how that occurred holds a strong curiosity for me.
There is a palpable sense of loss I wanted to achieve in some of the paintings of chairs..In the riots, chairs were taken out of context, used to smash into buildings as well as stolen…
A few visitors to my studio said that the chairs as well as the glass paintings had ‘monstrous delicacy,’ and these paintings have been described by many as ‘disturbing.’ which again reflects back on the vulnerabilities and fragilities of the human condition..more of that to come…
