Ghost Dance Painting

Working with a multi-disciplinary practice, across painting, printing, needlework, weaving, collage and 3D scanning, I converge historical references from analogue and digital archives: assembling, layering, painting and un-painting. My work addresses the lingering presence of the past within the present, examining constructs of our contemporary condition as punctuated by anachronism, contradiction and multi-temporality. The merging of English and Greek-Cypriot cultures of my genealogical background has, undoubtedly, shaped my assemblage based approach. Reproductions from books on prehistoric Britain, Ancient Greece and Rome, Baroque ornament, the arts and crafts movement float amongst the vestiges of Modernist and contemporary motifs, digital clip art and analogue stock imagery from printers’ catalogues. These images and processes are linked by my pre-occupation with loss, redundancy and the ruin in visual culture, with an emphasis on the collapsing of hierarchies. Screen-printing, photocopiers and analogue projectors are used as much for their visual qualities as for their inherent ability to produce failures. The reproduced image is once again scanned, photocopied and digitally edited and so subjected to a kind of entropy, highlighting the contradictions and failures of our times. I subvert the intention and precision of 3D scanning media, taking the data into 2D rather than printing the object, thereby pushing the technology back to haptic materiality; returning to the hand in a post-digital age. I'm interested in what is at stake with painting, shifting between fragmentation and states of completion. Images are deleted, layered and obscured, producing palimpsests; the image itself becomes a ruin. ​