ARTIST STATEMENT
My practice aims to explore the human yearning for wholeness and ideals through beauty’s ability to connect us with the sacred.
I am interested in the possibilities Portraiture offers as a genre - it can create a window into memory allowing a moment to be captured. The moment is accessed and re-processed, memory and fantasy become mixed in and what is created isn’t a factual documentation of a past moment in time but a subjective impression. Portraiture has the power to turn ordinary people into icons through the combination of the idealised frozen moment and paintings ability to create illusions that seem alive and engaging. In this process the subject is lifted from a banal existence to a realm where time, death and decay can’t touch it.
At the core of this is the moment, the transient nature of beauty, time and ultimately our existence. The relationship between fantasy and reality is wrapped in with this theme, as the ever-shifting present is the only experience we can truly call reality. Anything in the past is sensed as memory, which alters and changes each time the memory is accessed, and the future is all conjecture, which means that our experience of living is felt as a continuous dance between fantasy and reality.
To me this transient existence between two worlds evokes a deep spiritual yearning for ideals and wholeness. I believe we all live through this in our own way, striving for different ideals of perfection, which can never be reached. Religion, beauty, love, success, etc. all provide a set of ideals for us to strive towards in an attempt to feel complete. We are swept along in the ever-changing moment on a journey which ultimately leads to death. We are discontinuous beings yearning for continuity – looking for certainty within the fluid ever-changing experience of life.