About the work

Since the invention of photography, painting is less concerned with specific imagery and more about how the artist remakes that imagery. Found images and film stills provide material and my work explores the contrast between the painted surface and the mechanical quality of the source image. The painting Muse (Arbus/Bourgeois) is part of a series of celebrated women artists satirically referencing the tradition of ‘honorary’ portraits, alluding to the fact women struggled, until the rise of feminist theory, to be accepted within the art system. The disembodied nudes,  Docile Bodies, affirm Sylvère Lotringer’s observation that “Art has to look inward to justify itself to counter its definition by extrinsic conditions of the market place”. The paintings were informed by Michel Foucault’s theories of the objectification of the body which is so prevalent in late capitalist society and evidence that “a docile body may be subjected, used, transformed and improved” to which women are especially vulnerable.

With digital technology the recording of our lives is instantaneous and I am interested in how that impacts on our sense of time, place and memory and want to demonstrate that the medium of paint on canvas has the capacity to engage the viewer in an experience of seeing.