location/locality (2005)
The Diorama Gallery
London, UK
My painting practice makes use of the portrait genre because of my interest in people and their faces, especially of those who are in my immediate environment, such as friends and family, and those of popular culture found in the media. I am interested in people’s relationships with each other and how identity and memory are affected by these relationships, looking at the fluidity and performance of identity within the context of others and attempting to explore this theme through my paintings. Not only am I focusing on the relationships between the subjects found within the canvas, but I am also examining the relationships between the subjects in the painting with both myself and the observer.
In this series, I present oil paintings of myself on white backgrounds. These works relate to my on-going examination of the validity of history and memory and the freedom taken in their (re)creations. The questioning of their validity reinforces the idea that they cannot be taken for true facts and are always biased and questionable as ultimate truths. These paintings represent events of the past, memories even, but in locating these memories, their recollection is questioned. The subject and viewer are both locatable yet location-less at the same time, within the painting, raising questions around identity, memory and time all in relation to physical and psychological location of the self.
