I make painterly collages, with colour, tonal and textural qualities built by layering found, deconstructed images, scraps of text, packaging, fabric and foil wrappers, seed husks, dried leaves and petals. I work into the images with remnants of oil pastels, inks, chalk, paint, chubby crayons and coloured pencils. Working only in ‘rubbish’ lifts a self-imposed two-decade-long suspension on making art (intended to reduce my impact on the planet). It also provides a visually and texturally dynamic medium.
Narrative figuration, drawing on Medieval and early Renaissance iconography, is central to The Syria Series, fictive images framed and divided in old watercolour boxes. Inspired by Breton Vierges Ouvrantes (carved statues of The Madonna, which open to reveal pictorial motifs), the work evolved partly from footage of children, massacred in Sarin gas attacks, August 2013. Gold fields elevate the status of ‘characters’, and heighten themes of sacrifice, tragedy, weakness, disorder. Dead birds stand for thwarted, suppressed potential; for paralysed language. It was bird corpses, (not dead babies) that sanctioned the West’s belief in the truth of the attacks near Damascus.
Like Vierges Ouvrantes, the boxes obscure and expose. Echoed in the weathered aesthetic of the collage process, layers both concealing and revealing, this is itself metaphorical of the narrative: the struggle to find a voice, to be heard and seen where the subject is trapped in a landscape of two-dimensional abstraction, recalling the decorative / naturalistic counterpoints of Klimt .
As a visual artist, poet and playwright, ‘writing’ and ‘making’ share a close psychological space; work in one form nourishes the others. The Diptych How hard it is to say ... / Diving through ... visualises a woman’s journey through Dante’s Inferno, while Syria Series explores and animates scenes in a stage play (Birds) I am writing.
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