THE |
Statement:As an artist, as well as being a front line key worker I am also amongst those of the creative community who have felt the toils head on, through lack of sales and cancellation and postponement of upcoming and future events throughout this year, not being able to stock up on new resources and sourcing out new canvas in person in order to motivate the production of more work. Above all, not knowing; not knowing what next day will bring, however having the grace and learning to trust in that whole realm of the unknown, that eventually things will work themselves out.
But in general this has been a particularly difficult time for me, at the beginning of this year I let go of one of the key figures in my life; my mum, as she sadly lost to her long battle to metastatic cancer and since then it’s felt like a constant learning curve, of how to live with my grief and mental health and find balance. However, for as long as I can remember my art practice has felt like a coping mechanism. A constant and nurturing relationship between my mind and I, forwarding messages to the surface of the artwork I create, an ability to channel my emotions through the art work that I create. Where the demanding nature of my daily routine has always kept me busy and given me something to work through my grief. I have struggled during this time of the current pandemic, because I am not able to be with the people who truly need me, not being able to be with or see my family. And yet I am grateful for this time too, because above all the things I have learnt already through the time I have spent in lockdown, is an ongoing refusal to give in to my grief and an allowance to be present with myself within the process of creating new art work within the studio at home. And this brings me to introduce my new collection, ‘The In Between’, which takes direct influence from this time. Transforming the representation of the things I see each day into flashes of vibrant colour and marks. Using colour, as a tool to communicate my own external and internal energy in the same way I might write a journal entry. A declaration of colours communicating the ways we see through what surrounds us each day, paints a completely different picture to the colours we sense. And that's a very personal experience for me, as an artist, to produce art that expresses the transference of my own and others emotive language, through the simplicity of colour and mark. Whereas, each of these works in this collection refer to themes of social distancing and isolation, it also sets out a journey, a route listing all of the destinations I have travelled to within my conscious and unconscious mind. As seen in, ‘Where Do You Go To?’ (2020), I look to explore and identify the grounding I have found from within myself; upon stepping out from that isolated setting of our homes. Questioning where and more importantly why we may unconsciously vacate to certain places within our minds in moments of pure loneliness. |