My painting practice revolves around the themes of traces of identity, lost histories and nostalgia, photographs and the family album.

 

The family album, by its nature, is linked to memory and nostalgic reflection. It carries echoes of human existence, shows the passage of time, the search for self and the temporality of life. I am fascinated by the snapshots of past existences, which are captured in the frozen but fleeting moment of the images, preserving ancestral history and perpetuating recollections. Each picture conveys a story; each story changing in the retelling. As the memory fades and time passes, triggers for recall fade.

I am intrigued by the duplicity of memory. The confluence of the image, the emotions evoked and the narrative transmute the remembrance so that there is no longer a single reality.

The majority of my work is monotone and uses the photograph as source material. During the painting process I reduce the visual information from the original source and experiment with focus. By paring back and erasing faces or creating faces devoid of generic features, the identities are unknown, but still retain a cultural familiarity, so combining the personal and the shared experience.

As the paintings are edited and modified, with the selective rearranging and transformation, there is a shifting and layering of history and a merging of the past and the present.

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