paint as a multidimensional medium
1 July 2023
I approach painting as a multidimensional medium, which suits my interest in impermanence and fluidity. I work with acrylic paint in all its states from slippy liquid to flakey dry, using glued-together aluminium cooking foil to make expansive paintings that resist ever being finished.
I began using cooking foil as a low-cost experimental solution to enable my need to make large paintings, despite not having money or space to afford the traditional canvas and stretcher approach (I have a Arte Povera deep in the roots of my early art education and am forever in love with the empowerment to make art with whatever you can). Over time the foil has evolved conceptually as a substrate which makes the painting as much as the paint and my application of it. I love this collaboration! There is also a very sensory everyday recognition to using foil. I have strong memories of being a kid utterly absorbed playing with my Viscount biscuit wrapper for ages, and being fascinated seeing all the different ways foil is used in our day-to-day lives. It’s a weird, kind of trashy material to use, but also highly valuable with it’s abundant properties.
Drawing and mark-making are vital parts of my practice, exploring methods of abstraction by mixing up sections of drawings, and maquettes I have on my studio wall, bringing these periodically into my paintings.
There are many processes in my painting practice that actively engage my whole body, like stretching and sliding to push paint over large areas and using my weight to squash rolled and folded dry paintings or flatten areas. I’m thinking of working with the dry paint, still as painting, something is still very much happening to the overall painting during this process – creases and holes appear, as do previous layers of paint, or the foil surface is re-exposed. I move the paintings around a lot and welcome the messy complexity this offers, such as paint sticking to the dust sheet when I flip the painting over and old paint from the dust sheet getting sucked into the present painting. It is very cool seeing this happen.
My paintings connect strongly with sculptural language, and I enjoy the cross-pollination of this. My works are hybrids really, but there’s something I especially adore about painting and the dialogue of expanded painting. Being able to play with edges, flatness, surface, supports, what painting can be… There’s something earthy, visceral, and immediate about working with paint, primal. Yet, I cannot resist the tactility and not-being-able-to-see-it-all-at-once-ness of sculpture… the layers of distorted memory projection that come into play. I’ll just keep on making the work and see where it leads me. I fricking love art. It's like entering soul portals, connecting with so many artists and their works.
Sometimes I think of my large paintings as warped, flimsy, recreations of cave walls. I imagine the weight and depth behind an actual cave painting, versus the thinness of my paintings, and how fast mine could be crushed into a small dense thing, which would gradually then embed back into the mass of the earth.
Looking after my mentals
Acrylic paint and mediums, PVA, aluminium foil, 2 pins.
Approx 180h x 160w x 50d cm. 2023
