"Dramatic life experiences are like a pebble thrown into a pond - at first the water is disturbed with ripples - then after a while, the water becomes calm and still - but the stone remains" .
The fundamental inspiration for my work was the experience of growing up with my mentally ill father who came to England as a young refugee from Austria during WW2 and whose illness was a direct result of the traumas that he and other family members had suffered. Two sets of objects
he left me became motifs if my work: an old tin he brought with him from Austria containing the newly redundant household keys and the telegrams my aunt sent to the Red Cross seeking news of her mother. The artistic perspective to contain the trauma of the losses depicted by these found
objects comes from the testimony of a holocaust survivor at the Imperial War Museum describing her experiences as being ”like a stone being thrown into a pond...at first the water is affected with dramatic ripples, then after time the surface becomes calm, but the stone still remains”.
During my MA, I developed an artistic language (and a particular technique) for expressing the way in which individuals respond to and process traumatic memories, and how the responses change over time. This involves layering spray paint, pencil and ink around household objects leaving
their negative image behind. Over the last seven years, my father's keys have been supplemented by pins, nails, ring pulls etc found discarded on the streets of London, each object a cipher of loss, separation and abandonment.
Until recently, my work depicted dense balls of these objects in various manifestations of the thrown stone - darkly luminous balls of dread seared onto the inner eye, the knot of terror in the stomach, the desolation of numb shock, scorched impressions on flaking front doors the only
trace of lives departed or destroyed, and ironed-in folds in the canvas as records of telegrams read a thousand times over. Lighter renditions of the
theme use parts of toys, paper clips, fireworks - the more colourful and youthful spirit echoing a child’s ability to adapt to any circumstances in any
environment.
In my current work, the ball is now shattered, and open to inspection and analysis. Traumatic memories are now depicted solely by tailoring pins. The pins do not represent only the quality of the trauma (sharp, still painful, to be handled with care) but carry a promise of some kind of healing - the pins that hold together the rough first cut of the new garment being the harbingers of the needles that will stitch it. The architectural structures I have started to use (reminiscent of space stations, deep-sea exploration vessels or inspection portals for nuclear or bio-hazardous processes) give a sense of a place of safety from which these strange and dangerous subjects can be viewed. What we can see through the window is repellent as well as fascinating. It is this tension between wanting to see and being afraid of what you will see if you look for too long, that I am currently seeking to express.
The fundamental inspiration for my work was the experience of growing up with my mentally ill father who came to England as a young refugee from Austria during WW2 and whose illness was a direct result of the traumas that he and other family members had suffered. Two sets of objects
he left me became motifs if my work: an old tin he brought with him from Austria containing the newly redundant household keys and the telegrams my aunt sent to the Red Cross seeking news of her mother. The artistic perspective to contain the trauma of the losses depicted by these found
objects comes from the testimony of a holocaust survivor at the Imperial War Museum describing her experiences as being ”like a stone being thrown into a pond...at first the water is affected with dramatic ripples, then after time the surface becomes calm, but the stone still remains”.
During my MA, I developed an artistic language (and a particular technique) for expressing the way in which individuals respond to and process traumatic memories, and how the responses change over time. This involves layering spray paint, pencil and ink around household objects leaving
their negative image behind. Over the last seven years, my father's keys have been supplemented by pins, nails, ring pulls etc found discarded on the streets of London, each object a cipher of loss, separation and abandonment.
Until recently, my work depicted dense balls of these objects in various manifestations of the thrown stone - darkly luminous balls of dread seared onto the inner eye, the knot of terror in the stomach, the desolation of numb shock, scorched impressions on flaking front doors the only
trace of lives departed or destroyed, and ironed-in folds in the canvas as records of telegrams read a thousand times over. Lighter renditions of the
theme use parts of toys, paper clips, fireworks - the more colourful and youthful spirit echoing a child’s ability to adapt to any circumstances in any
environment.
In my current work, the ball is now shattered, and open to inspection and analysis. Traumatic memories are now depicted solely by tailoring pins. The pins do not represent only the quality of the trauma (sharp, still painful, to be handled with care) but carry a promise of some kind of healing - the pins that hold together the rough first cut of the new garment being the harbingers of the needles that will stitch it. The architectural structures I have started to use (reminiscent of space stations, deep-sea exploration vessels or inspection portals for nuclear or bio-hazardous processes) give a sense of a place of safety from which these strange and dangerous subjects can be viewed. What we can see through the window is repellent as well as fascinating. It is this tension between wanting to see and being afraid of what you will see if you look for too long, that I am currently seeking to express.
