.
.
.
.
.
“ What any true painting touches is an absence - an absence of which, without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss. The painter’s continual search is for a place to welcome the absent.” John Berger
Since the late 1990s my work has touched upon the photographic in various ways. Initially I used photographs from various sources and played with scale, contrast and materiallity. The translation of the photographic image into the language of painting offered the opportunity to reflect on how each reveals and hides aspects of the world, in/visibility. Later I became interested in using photographs, which I had already been collecting from junk shops. Family photographs, things which had been part of peoples lives although now the context of original meaning is lost. The process of recovering these photographs took on a two fold aspect - literally bringing back the discarded, the lost, the obsolete. Then recovering the image by working it through a process of erasure and inscription., until something emerged, a new aspect.
The process of making
is important, since it is through an active and open ended engagement with materials and tools that possibilities emerge, become present.
But presence is always presence
'somewhere' and this leads me to think about Locatedness, in fact about place.
More recently I have been working with the idea of photographs as a kind displacement that is both temporal and spatial. In this sense the image is preserved ’out of time’ but it is also ‘out of place’. Our notions of place seem to be highly linked to seeing e.g. site/sight, similar connections exist in other languages. What could it mean for such an image to be connected to place again (or become place), replacement rather than displacement?
