A question concerning reconciliation; between the ineffable and how it can be located in a visual materiality, is one I find best satisfied through painting. Sources can range from: an overheard conversation in another room, to an encounter of nocturnal phenomena in urban or rural landscape.
As an exchange student in up-state New York in the late 90s, I had the opportunity to take classes in neon sculpture. As a painter neon has a dynamic substance, I wanted to translate into pigment. I wanted to turn these tubes inside out to expose the phosphorous chemicals inside; to capture the velvet and shimmering coruscations of the night sky, that serve as a backdrop to interests in filmic ideas. This turning inside out, to conceal some things to reveal others in a kaleidoscope of light shadow and body, has been a growing preoccupation.
Places that resonate with a perceived cultural heritage, through fragments of memory and identity, become woven together in observed delta like motifs, that serve as: a kind of grounding in interests in pictorial boundaries, thresholds, reflections, and apertures converging on what is seen as a landscape trope for me as a British person of mixed Nigerian and Dutch heritage. As such, this has something to do with wanting to paint myself as a Blakean visionary type who, possibly, has access to places others don’t.
The problem of not knowing whether the picturing or the painting allows the image to emerge, points to what is at stake for me: the transformation between what illuminates either the material or the idea during the creative process and how this permeates the embodied work.
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