artist statement : methods: exhibitions
My current practice focuses on flower imagery and the landscape. But my interest in these subjects is not traditional in the romantic sense: my recent work focuses on dead flowers and animals and abandoned industrial buildings – all the subjects of trauma. I am drawn to these subjects for their inherent stillness, fragility, loss and the sense of history they embody and because they invoke the feelings that move me to paint.
I became fascinated with a derelict quarry site close to my Hertfordshire studio about five years ago. The immense size of the abandoned buildings spoke of huge industrial power but they stood broken and idle; grass and sapling trees grew from machine parts and discarded junk. My paintings explore these themes contemplating the monumental scale of the buildings against the landscape; the substance of decay and neglect. A set of mixed media drawings completes the series. I display the drawings in kitsch picture frames which I found (still containing family photos stained and sodden) in an old chest of drawers dumped in the quarry grounds – a chance find that allowed me to underline the complete desolation of the quarry – a location where it has become acceptable to discard unwanted histories.
I also found a decapitated rabbit head discarded at the quarry site. I was interested in the unspoken history of how the rabbit died, the trauma, the sad mystery suggested by its absent body. The French for still life means ‘little death’; this meaning conveys the qualities that I explore in the rabbit head studies.
The peonies that feature in my flower paintings – brilliant pink and lush when first purchased - died slowly in my studio and became papery and brown - now they crumple like old dead skin. Again I am drawn to the fragility of the flowers and the notions of decay and loss they embody: the moment by moment history by which they dried and lost their brilliant colour. The last works in this series completed in the spring of 2008 are very dark to the point of being monochrome - echoing the papery and colourless state of the now dead peonies.