Different points of departure
I call this piece ‘The Fighter’. It seems to be literally straining to get itself off the canvas. It’s beginnings came from a photograph of mine of a fairly ordinary object we might have in our homes or use elsewhere on a regular basis. I am not going to say what it is; it’s really not that important suffice to say it aims to transcend itself in my painting (which kind of relates to the function we tend to use it for – there’s my clue). This is often typical of my work, using the trappings of everyday minutiae and spring-boarding them into very different places so that they more often than not lose their initial identity.
As I have worked on the piece, I have found myself turning the work around and around so that I deliberately lose that anchoring sense of object and ground and discover new points of departure. This is starting to become a common practice when I paint. I find it exciting that the final destination is not a fixed one, and that it could hold a multitude of possibilities depending on which way you look at it. This references my work as a whole – that idea of crossing borders, between painting and photography, between reality and the imagination. It is about departing from one place and ending up or maybe just glimpsing another. It is about a shift between, about suspension and fluctuation. It is about alternative places and maybe a release of sorts.
