Portfolio

‘In Camera’ 2013 – 14

These paintings are based on some of the negatives which had been kept in a drawer in my former family home and only came to light when that house was about to be sold. They were taken in the Middle East in the mid-1940’s where my mother was living at the time.

The process of realising them as paintings bears comparison to some of Walter Benjamin’s remarks in his essay ‘Task of the translator’ (1920) where he relates translation to the work of collecting fragments and putting the pieces together so that:

“……. instead of imitating the sense of the original, (the translation) must lovingly and in detail incorporate the originals way of meaning, thus making both original and translation recognisable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel”.

I hope these paintings do just that.

Oil and mixed media on panel

‘The Garden Suite’ 2010 -13

In a Hastings junk shop I came across a striking little black & white photograph of a young women standing on a swing, she seemed to be suspended in time and space. On subsequent visits (over several years) I recovered more of them. All were of the same garden, house and I assume, family. I have not found any new photographs in recent years, however the series potentially remains open to any new ‘emanations’.

“ If the past is another country, it is one to which painting grants us access, but only through and by way of its own immediate and present limits.” (1)

The girl suspended on a swing seems emblematic of a sense of the ‘in-between’, a potential site of encounter, where through painting’s ‘own immediate and present limits’ things can come to light.