Looking Back
The galleries take a look back at more than 30 years of the fine artists work and the periods it has taken her, beginning with Family Album; a multi-media work and installation where at 23 years of age the young artist examined her beginnings as a working class woman born in the East-End of London. Each period the artist has traveled informed the next. The history of her work in these galleries sharply exposes how the autobiographical has always formed a foundation to her artworks creation and with a brutal honesty which has remained constant throughout the years.
I was born in the working class East-End of London, I’ve been painting my entire life, at 17 I was accepted at my first art school and at 26 I completed my PhD at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. At the heart of my artwork is the autobiographical, by drawing from my own personal experiences in life with soul baring honesty, I hope to reveal in my artwork essential truths which unite us. A connection which is real.
My passion are my lines and their movement and my materials for all they are in their essence and all they give to me. I often venture from the boundaries of conventional media and some of my works employ the services of metals; gold, copper and iron for their individual truths in what they are. Gold for its purity, copper for its strength to weather great storms and to protect that which is internal, and iron for its beauty as it decays.
When I begin a piece I never know where it is going to go; it takes me. I only know the feel of the mediums I need embraced in my hand, be it a graphite pencil, a piece of pastel or a brush full of oil paint with all the smells that go with it. It is love that I have with whatever I hold in my hand and a trust it knows where it is going because I surely do not. That trust has never forsaken me.
My art gives vision to the silent internal journey we go on as we deal with the realities of our lives, realities above that can form scars below. This journey has led me to explore different forms of mediums to better express what lays below. In some work the weathering of iron particles on my surfaces communicate change and the irreversible nature of decay. A surface which should be ugly becomes one of beauty when seen in a different way.
– The Artist
ARTWORK IN TIME
RETROSPECTIVE
1986 - PRESENT