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, or 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 are material to be transformed.
I 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 my twin-sister and I shared a symbiotic creative relationship, sanctuary from a judgemental 1970’s world. Against the odds, we transformed aged 13, losing 45lbs in a summer. Unrecognizable, a cause-celebre, the shock of our success brought a deep ambivalence, a yearning for our lost secret world. Thus began a nostalgic bent in my imagination that continues. Having left the US
and lived in Scotland for many years, I cope with my nostalgia by believing in parallel universes where all possibilities exist. Alongside this fantasy is the desire to deconstruct it, free myself from my haunted American Dream.
My imagined landscapes are 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. With this, archive photography, polaroids, literature, fairytale make up an associative memory process that is brought alive through the act of
painting. Painting resonates with transformative possibilities. As in the story of the ugly duckling it mirrors 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