2022
University of St Andrews
Collaboration with theologists at the University of St Andrews, exploring text and image and the idea of revelation.
Text from exhibition catalogue:
My work for this exhibition explores the material integrity of images in the context of the project theme of revelation. It includes paintings on cut-up cardboard boxes, a textile piece featuring embroidered lettering that can only be read with a mirror, and a set of nine sculpted ceramic tiles. It is part of ongoing attempts to make work that defamiliarises the act of looking in response to the daily experience of using the internet.
As we move across its gleaming surface with search terms and tabs, the internet can feel like a limitless extension of thought. It is a space that can seem to swallow time, and in which images are not objects but digital reproductions, scaled to fit whatever screen we happen to be viewing them on.
To explore this contemporary experience of disembodied looking and sense-making, I was drawn to medieval depictions of space, in particular to the playful representation of physical space in two Sienese paintings showing saintly intervention, from which I’ve borrowed figures and a colour palette. The medieval pictorial device of continuous narrative, which sees chronologically distinct scenes integrated within a single picture, has also been a point of reference.
I wanted to make a long moment; to create an unsequenced narrative, with imagery running across different objects, that slows down the act of looking. Themes, colours and formal ideas – holes, emergent figures, cut-outs, falling, children, repetition – link the works and, I hope, present meaning-making as an imaginative act requiring physical space and time.
1.
A sequence
Mixed media textile
100 x 155cm
2.
Child falling out of an old painting
Acrylic on cardboard
67 x 103cm
3.
Two arrivals
Acrylic on cardboard
16cmx12cm and 30cmx16cm
4.
Nine parts
Ceramic, acrylic, varnish
40 x 40cm
