Lacuna 1 Painting

Oil paint on Mylar - beautifully framed. One of the paintings in my new body of work for my exhibition, Lacunae. My work continues to investigate issues that have preoccupied me for over a decade: memory and language. The title Lacunae – unfilled spaces, gaps, missing parts – speaks to a more direct focus on and concern with the absence of memory, the emptiness in between what we know and do not know, the echo that remains in its wake. In visually exploring these themes, my two aesthetic poles of enquiry – figurative and text based work – have begun to come together, conflate, such that a more nuanced or complex interplay of the elements of my painterly vocabulary has emerged. This patterning, or pre-verbal signage, reflects the sense of erasure and loss of memory that have occupied me in the works on Mylar, presented as obscure word puzzles, literary palimpsests. Here, my refrain of stenciled words are stuttered, repeated, erased against a backdrop of full then empty spaces and gaps, mirroring the impediments, the obstructions to knowing the past and thus ourselves. By relinquishing my hold on a fully rendered figure or legible text, the spaces open up, become more evocative, resonant, a site of possibility and further discovery, a condition I continually aspire towards as a visual artist.