Strange Attractors
I’ve always thought of architecture as a form of storytelling, a visual vocabulary that overcomes functionality into imaginative fiction...
Each time we enter a space we open a new chapter, as the context and history begins to unfold. It fuels curiosity and unveils small elements of surprise. Similarly, I see the actions of painting form a rhythm within a story; in its repetitive mark-making, its harmony and discordance in colours, and compositional spatial depth.
I believe through forming hybrid art forms within the expanded field of painting, installation can encompass these ideas as a ‘short story’, proposing a place of experimentation, innovation and spatial experience; intervening the mundane and providing short bursts of emancipation from everyday life.
The title of my MA show 'Strange Attractors' called upon curious similarities within spacial interventions of different (strange!) architectural spaces, creating mysterious attractions which both distorted and disorientated the viewers perspective and explored the manipulations of light as a medium itself.
More often than not my working method has involved the increasing need to shed weight and de-clutter; to rise above the chaos of my imagination and relinquish any weight which I feel burdens my creativity and stifles my progression as an artist.
Although Italo Calvino is speaking for literature, much of his tools of literary values are identifiable with the actions of an artist, and particularly the activity of a painter. When I speak of lightness I’m not specifically talking about brightness, hues or contrasts, but lightness in rejuvenating ideas and refreshing concepts; addressing the developments of my practice and confronting the transitions in my research.
As a painter I have frequently stumbled across the "troubles of painting" and laboriously felt the "exhaustion" within the "severely restricted" surface, constantly returning to the theories of Michael Fried and Brian O'Doherty and reluctantly feeling the need to "give up working on a single plane in favour of three-dimensions".
But there has always been something compelling me to pursue painting as a practice.
For the past year I have journeyed through a battling process of control and intuition whilst discovering the intrinsic nature of my practice. How only through playful experimentation was I able to formulate further ideas, and how the use of repetition was essential in rediscovering prospective possibilities within my work. I have become in tune with the need to work excessively in order to achieve that reductive point, and the fluctuating repetitive processes within my work are very particular and specific to the understanding and meaning of my practice.
