My Practice primarily serves as a tool for the recollection of my own past. It is a deeply personal body of work.
My inspiration for this project came when I was sifting through old photo albums during the summer. Upon first looking at these images I was filled with a warm sense of nostalgia and yearning, my mind flooding with stories from the past.
Yet as quickly as these memories came, they also vanished, I found my self straining to try and remember images that had been in my head moments ago. I realised then that I need to make work about this, something that evokes such a powerful response can’t be ignored.
My memories have become layered, I cannot distinguish one from the other, what really happened and what was a dream. The feeling when you you can't remember if something happened, or if you dreamed it into your own reality. That both amazes me and scares me. The more time passes, the more my own memories begin to feel uncertain, shifting into dreams of what might’ve been.
My work aims to communicate the duality of dreamlike disorientation alongside comforting nostalgia. Through my use of collage to create new distorted narratives and thin washes of oil paint and turpentine, I try to create paintings that embody both a sense of calm, but also a sense that things are not quite as they seem. Memories melting away on the canvas surface.
