My practice this year has taken the form of sketches made into paintings. Presently, it is a collection of brightly coloured A4 pieces, made on card and then mounted onto mountboard of the same size. Consisting mostly of portraits, some of the pieces are displayed still in sketch form, not yet painted or only partially painted. This method speaks to the overall themes of the works which are to do with the freezing of time and the fragmentation of process.
They are to be presented evenly spaced along the gallery wall, with their individual titles listed on a separate plaque. Due to their regular, everyday size, they are easily accessible as they can be viewed up close in detail, while the viewer still retains the full picture. Like this, one can move along the wall, having an individual audience with each piece. One could also take several steps back to view the collection as a whole.
This project initially arose from my desire to incorporate my poetry into my art practice. I specifically chose two of my poems which felt to me like they could inspire something visual. They both had notes of a longing to freeze time and remember beautiful moments.
I made a few sketches and paintings which were similar in style to the illustrations of poet-artists ever increasingly found on Instagram. They were drawn from imagination and depicted unlikely scenarios, such as a girl sitting in a clock without hands.
At this point I realised I wanted to draw things that were real and had actually existed in the world. Instead of painting a picture of the poems I wanted to actually do what the poems speak of – I wanted to freeze time.
I took some candid photos of my friends. When I would see what I call ‘perfect moments’ I would capture them. I would print them out and use them as a reference for drawings and paintings, often excluding the background of the photo – it is the subject that holds the most importance.
After a conversation with a tutor, I recognised that there seemed to be two strains of ideas present in my work, so I decided to split them off from each other. One was the creative illustrations which drew directly from the poems. I have made this a side project to be revisited at a later date. The other was the paintings from photographs, of the seemingly uneventful scenes, and this is the project I have continued working on.
My work forms part of the discussion around, “Why do we take photographs?”. Is it because memory is unreliable? Is it to prove we exist or that a certain thing happened?
Painting rather than photography, arguably captures not just the raw moment itself, in its exact form, but also memorializes the magic of the moment. I don’t paint exact copies of the photos. I do not possess that skill and even if I could what would be the point. The way I do it means I get to play around with all the different qualities present in the photo. I can edit colours and shadows if I choose to. Sometimes I decide that certain areas of a painting should remain in sketch form to make a comment on the imperfectness of memory and how this can be used to one’s advantage. They might appear incomplete or unfinished but sometimes, just a fragment of a memory is more significant than the whole. In this way I don’t just document and record a moment exactly as it happened, but I also get to actively create the memory.
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