A question of documents Print

I have come to painting through writing. As an academic I have written on domestic space, on the idea of home and the affects tied to it, an interest that may well have been fed by my nomadic life. The subjects that are common to both my art and writing are memory and nostalgia, or what the Welsh call ‘hiraeth’ the desire to return to a home that no longer exists, or perhaps never was, the yearning for the lost places of one’s past. I started painting about 20 years ago as I was volunteering in an art centre for homeless people and realized for the first time that ‘safe as houses’ was really just a myth. As the idea of the taken for grantedness of homes has been increasingly eroded by the pervasiveness of images of their precariousness, houses have continued to haunt my dreams and have found their way into my paintings. These are lived-in buildings, more often battered than pristine, in cities or wastelands, or existing only in memory, and I often return to them. Cut up, reassembled into different shapes, they become the characters in the painting, together with the figures that might very well have inhabited them. I am drawn to abandoned places and objects, even junk off the street. Many of my paintings are precisely about junk, waste, that which waits for collection on the pavements of our cities, but also remaindered humans, the ignored, who wait for a sign of attention. Some of the paintings deliberately mirror the dumping sites that are the dark side of civilisation. Waste is what we discard and abandon and recklessly leave behind, dismal proof of our existence. In these paintings, waste, which is, like dirt, ‘matter out of place’, is deployed as a metaphor for the displaced, the unwanted that our wars and exploitation have left behind, our legacy —they too treated as matter out of place, that which we have produced but would rather not see and for which the vastness and indifference of the world can find no better place than in ‘designated holding areas’. I think in colours as I did when I was a child, which is probably why painting has become more important to me than writing. Colours, the sensuousness of the medium that holds you while you paint and brings you to a halt in front of a picture and makes you want to stroke it, and the element of happenstance are what I most value in painting.