Statement
It was a great formative experience to watch my Father create caricatures from photographs, draw portraits at fetes and to accompany him to London where he occasionaly stopped during a visit to galleries and became a pavement artist, with crowds gathering to see him work. My fascination with the face had begun. Thus it became the inevitable starting point when I began to document with video my painting process.
As the completion of my BA (Hons.) Fine Art at Plymouth University, my work for the Final Degree Show is a reflection on the moment 'inbetween' this life and another.
Many cultures and faiths believe in other conditions, experiences, places between this life and the next, and finally a rebirth into another life, which may be a insect, animal, fish or human. This I express through these paintings of faces and skulls, showing our possible past lives and future lives too trying to imagine and portray this 'inbetween' state.
The works on paper by Marlene Dumas at the Tate, London led me to experiment with monoprints and ink painting on paper.. Another strong influence has been the portraiture of Gerhard Richter.
Prior to the painting process, I set up a video camera to film myself, then, using a blurred iphone self-portrtait photograph as the subject - I paint on cotton rag paper, sometimes prepared in advance with monoprints. Watercolour and encaustic are other media I use. In the next stage I transform them, breaking them down with a chemical oxidation process. The documentation of this becomes part of my work, and the the video recordings show the breaking down, blurring them into my creation of an inbetween state which interests me.
Part of this body of work is with large format photographs, and these too have been broken down, literally, obfuscated with a chemical process, inbetween the image in the catalogue being printed and the hanging of the work.
I seek to engage the audience with the concept that they may have been in another form in a previous life, or may be in the future. and in this work faces and skulls are evocative of these possibilities.