“Memory is a lunatic prop’s mistress”
Wrote Annie Erneau in A Girl’s story. I love everything about that line. Objects rising to the surface across time, powers simmering beneath her tremulous hands.
My practice is a site of delirious speculation and make-believe. I create props which invite and repel. I act as though a painting might be a membrane between worlds.
It has been written that when our predecessors lived in an animistic and enchanted environment, their perception of the self was porous, not sealed. Rivers were goddesses and we, with our leaky selfhoods were at their mercy. Through my practice, I carve out a space for porous, transformational reverence – it is an act of memory and imagination, a place to dwell on the miraculous, and to speculate with mythological thinking.
Using egg tempera, which demands slow, devotional brush work, I have painted three actresses. Each resembles the other – they are up for the same part, and ripple like echoes with red hair and painted lips. They linger in an oval, like a magic mirror, and search for their way to a recall, protecting their faces. Below them, seed pods shake in a mountain of jelly, eagerly shimmering, a network of chorus girls.
There is a mystical Celtic belief, that if you are trying to approach the other world, you are already there. These painted places I paint, or sculpted props I mould, are bridges to conceive this way of understanding time and place. I stretch across time and lay offerings at the feet of my ancestor, a ballet dancer who wore out his stockings with grace. Horsehair like that pulled off a cello’s bow creeps across the floor- beckoning him back.