Abstract:
The places on which we tread hold significance for us with narratives relating to memory,
emotion and nostalgia. My paintings hold a tension in their articulation between realism and
abstraction, drawing and painting. In my work I investigate how being lost relates to walking and
slow looking. Intentionally doing this enables me to parse elements of the world into my work,
questioning the spectacle of the ordinary via the ground beneath us as it transmutes an interpretation
through drawing and painting. Rebecca Solnit notes a prescient question from pre-Socratic
philosopher Meno in her book A Field Guide to Getting Lost, “how will you go about finding that
thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” (2017, p.4).
My work relates to Donna Haraway’s concept of sympoiesis from her book Staying with the Trouble,
her hope of multi species ‘making together’, recognising that we are not apart-from, but part-of each
other and others, including critters and nature (2016, p.58). The process of discovering, creating and
making-with my dog and the bees who make my medium, all translate into a painting’s multiple
layers as a re-creation of history and capture of a point in time.
My subject-matter is representative of vibrant matter, a reference to Jane Bennett’s idea that we shift
our perception of nonhuman things to viewing these things as holding vitality, and as a result, an
ecological recognition of their active participation in the world (2010, p. 2). Theorist Edward Soja
writes about the third space where the ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ come together (as cited in Mehretu, 2013,
p.60). I consider this concept of third space and relate it to Tim Ingold’s writing about material agency
and how by making art, the vitality and third space of a work of art arises from the intentions of the
artist plus the use of materials (Ingold, 2013, p. 96).