Mother & Daughter Reunited, 2021 (digital photograph)

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CV

My work frequently uses history and mythology to stand witness to often hidden or silenced lives, particularly those of women. I have been inspired by notions of female agency in The Odyssey, by images of women from history and mythology, and from B&W social history photographs of the 1920s and ‘30s. I make paintings, drawings, sculpture, installations, assemblages, and moving image. Process, time, and the relationship between object and subject link the recurring patterns and images in my work: doubling; elusive surfaces; ambiguity; silence; strength and fragility. Hands, mirrors, threads, masks, and isolated or misunderstood individuals, both past and present, frequently appear.

I let my materials lead me, whether paint, graphite powder, charcoal, wax, soot or moving image. I have made 'blind mirror' plaster sculptures; graphite and wax panels; an octagonal graphite-covered chamber for contemplation; a selection of cartographical curiosities and handmade compasses; paintings of isolated buildings and individuals; and an installation of haiku and moving image about a community’s experiences of flooding. During Lockdown, I collaborated distantly with my dance-artist daughter, and made a series of human-sized, dynamic charcoal drawings with projected video in colour, based on a gift of flowers. These “moving still lifes” are shown in a darkened meditative space, where a sensuous, hypnotic surface plays with drama, intimacy, and spectacle.

My current practice focuses on painting and on drawing with smoke. More accurately, the medium is soot, defined as 'a deep black powdery substance consisting largely of amorphous carbon, produced by incomplete burning of organic matter’: in my case, a beeswax taper.  I returned to this way of working after feeling the last breath leave my father's body. For me, this elusive medium captures the fragility and transience of life, and of family and collective memories fading back through time.