In developing the figures I paint, I draw on the principles of cadavre exquis as well as the logic of paper dolls. My source material is drawn from a wide range of references: publicly accessible archives, contemporary fashion catalogues, memories and stories.

 

The resulting combinations, however, are never arbitrary. They emerge through a painterly process in which I repeatedly layer and test different possibilities against one another. It is from this process that my figures gradually take shape.

 

The individual stages of this development are never entirely erased. Instead, they remain visible as traces of memory, like a palimpsest or a pentimento.

 

I have come to realise that the memories shared by family members during my childhood have been absorbed into my own consiousness almost as though they were my own.

Alongside them sit the narratives of classic children’s literature, fragments of news reports, and the chromatic world of the books of my childhood. I’m interested in the negotiations where inherited narratives and lived experience become inseperable, and where one state gradually shifts into another much as childhood merges into adulthood.

 

The spaces in which these transitions unfold hold particular significance for me. Within my paintings I search for resolutions, while deliberately allowing certain passages to remain open, as unresolved questions, as open fields of colour.