Odes to Memory

 “There is another world, but it is in this one” 

- Paul Eluard, Donner à Voir, 1939 

One morning when my daughter woke, she asked me earnestly, “Where do we go when we sleep?” She was old enough to be referring to the journeys of our inner world and I smiled because it is the exact enquiry that motivates my work. I feel compelled to ‘make visible’ the archives of the mind. 

Drawing on the tradition of the female form in painting, I have chosen women as my subjects, though the theme stretches to all human beings irrespective of gender. We are all products of our experiences and the histories of our ancestors. The figures are in profile, some gaze to the past and some to the future. They have each other’s back. Painting the inner world is a poetic errand, as memory and feeling are not easy to delineate. Having said that, they do invoke and define each other and shape the mind that holds them. This work might have been abstract or pure metaphor but I wanted to depict the faces of real women who are close to me - women who I know to have loved deeply, and suffered loss and illness and who bravely face an uncertain future. Their portraits represent the earthly shape of their dream times.

This show with Georgina Stuart and Kiata Mason began as a dialogue around the theme of ‘collections’. I began to wonder about what motivates a person to start a collection. For me, these treasures are all linked to memories of friends and family and I keep the treasures close as a tribute to those memories. As such, the idea of ‘collection’ became more about memories than the objects themselves. And so this work, ‘Odes to Memory’ came about.