Staring at the Sun
What are memories and in how are we as humans attached them? How is it possible to make visual representations of something that only appears as deeply personal impressions in the mind? How does one work in a dialectic process with the painting to understand the significance of memory?
I have worked within a monochrome colour field on mould-made cotton paper mounted on round wooden boards. The pieces set off as figurative and colourful paintings with images stemming from my own distant memories. The images are covered with thin layers of gouache, then washed down with water, new images emerge and are reconstructed as abstract form, everything is then covered anew and the process is repeated endlessly until the works present themselves as meaningful compositions. The nature of gouache allows for a multitude of underlying traces of colours to shine through, and they end up as yellow energy fields with suggestive images somewhat appearing through the layers. The works have been layered, washed down and reshaped from anything between 20-60 times.
Working on paper means working with a canvas that holds a certain fragility, much like dreams and memories. The wooden boards are heavy, creating a contrast to the lighter, more delicate paper. The quality of the works as objects suggests ambivalence between the lightness and heaviness of memory. The continuous repetition of creating, erasing, leaving traces and altering becomes almost like séance, a deeply psychological process.
We alter old memories in a continuum as our life progresses, so how could anyone paint something that only exists as thought? In my work I seek to boil the vast process of memory down to its essence, although no essence can actually be found. The meaning of memory seems to exist in a constant flux.