I dream of landscapes, remote, disused, abandoned: fields, trees, clouds and night. A house is exploding somewhere in the darkness, dreamy, a lacework like a painting come to life. 

Memory is a story we tell ourselves, collected moments curated into narrative. When the details get lost, become unclear, we fill in the blanks and tell a new story. The paradox of memory is that by looking to the past we become alive in the present moment, feel memory as part of the body.

In my practice I want to give memory visual and physical form. I am interested in narratives of transformation and displacement how they are mirrored in personal memory and collective experience and expressed through the process of painting.  Myth, story, memory is matter to be transformed. The materials I use, the places where I work are an essential part of my approach.

I also draw on landscapes of memory and story from my childhood as an identical twin, from an adulthood as a migrant. As fat little girls in Ohio in the 1960’s & 70’s my sister and I became isolated, shamed. Our symbiotic relationship, a deep creative connection, was a bulwark against a world that was completely unreconstructed in its response to what was considered a physical and moral failing. Aged 13 against the odds we transformed ourselves by losing 45lbs (20kg) in a summer. We were unrecognizable, a cause celebre. With the shock of our success came a deep ambivalence, a yearning for the childhood that had disappeared, for the secret world we had lost. Thus began a nostalgic bent in my imagination that continues. Having left my country and lived for many years in Scotland, I cope with my own nostalgia by believing in parallel universes where all possibilities exist. Alongside this fantasy is the desire to deconstruct it, destroy it and free myself of the last vestiges of my American Dream.

In my work romanticism combines with contemporary painting moves, geometric line, ben day dots create psychological topographies, gothic and sci-fi landscapes inspired by dystopian writers such as Shirley Jackson and Phillip K Dick. The clapboard houses of my childhood, dayglo trees, ambiguous interiors, connect my own nostalgia to ideas of fragmentation and haunted futures. Formed from dream logic, my paintings displace memory into a dream, into a shared ghost story.

The imagined landscapes in my paintings are also created through a deep understanding of real landscape. I work outdoors in remote and abandoned places drawing deeply from their unfolding histories. Painting in these places works like an embodied memory. Walking to my destination, working in the light and movement of nature becomes a meditation on being present in time.  Along with this, archive photography, polaroids, literature, fairytale form an associative memory process brought to the present tense through the act of painting. Paint resonates with transformative possibilities; texture, gesture, colour, layered over time, echo the ancient pursuit of transforming base material into something beautiful and enduring.

I am a member of:
Scottish Society of Artists Visual Arts Scotland Scottish Contemporary Art Network, Studio 1.1, London