Galleries

Rehearsals

Rehearsals: When Are We Ever Only Ourselves

(2018-2023)

“Look at what is going on around you- in all its richness and detail and colour, its beauty and its ugliness; don’t stop looking and thinking about what you see; but also don’t forget that it is you who are looking, that you have a position and a place from where you look – and so do others. Inhabit that place fully.”

The Good Story, Arabella Kurtz and J.M. Coetzee

“This core idea that we can act with liberty and agency to alter the ways we act in everyday life, thereby to a degree at least controlling who we are, was pioneered in urban studies, in terms of understanding how cities’ identities are socially produced through the ways we act in them and also how individual’ identities are produced in the city.”.

Theatre & the City, Jen Harvie

In Rehearsals, I use found imagery, to create theatrical narratives. My intent in these paintings is to produce liminal landscapes: places of transition, disruption and possibility that arise out of my combining disparately sourced elements. I am also fascinated with gesture, the way we humans position our arms and limbs and what our resulting gestures can convey. Gesture is primal to human communication, to the stories we tell ourselves and others. The narratives I paint are not specific. There is often no single or clear meaning, no easily determined perspective. I am interested in multiple perspectives, how each being in a painting carries at least one story. And how no one story is primary. I am drawn to the uncanny, the mysterious, the unexpected and to environments that seem marginal, peripheral and that offer the viewer a sense of being betwixt and between, being both awake and dreaming.