The last few days in the studio before the show

 

The snow is thawing as I write this post and unlike other occasions when I’ve thought spring is not far away and then it snows for three days, I really believe the season is changing now.

I walked with friends; Vanessa and Laura who were visiting, through the old village and melting snow produced a cacophony of sound that accompanied the eerie spectacle of black shovelled mountains on every street corner. For the last few days there has been a white fog that has hung in the air and it is much warmer and damper which perversely feels colder….anyway I’m glad its not sunny as I spend my last week in the studio before the exhibition opens Friday week. 

The work has a momentum of its own now as I realise what its about and where its going. It seems so glaringly obvious but hindsight is a great thing and often you can’t grasp what is so immediate in the present. Meidan Talo encapsulates an intense frozen moment of a need for ‘home’ a constant place where I am safe. When I was growing up home was never calm or predictable and perhaps this is the truth of the matter; I had to make a home in my head. I took refuge through absorbing myself in worlds created in drawings and paintings - this is what I still do years on. Meidan Talo (Our House) has perhaps materialised a realisation, as my friend Lee so astutely observed when seeing the work, that home is a state of mind. 

Arranging and re-arranging Meidan Talo combinations will pre-occupy me for the next few days as I work out which pieces fit together. The wallpaper, household objects, lace, tar and paint all connect in their various forms and its like a puzzle that never has any one outcome. 

It seems to me that sentimentality and nostalgia are a currency of the domestic decorative which provides a fantasy of a familial condition we can’t let go of. Maybe this is why so much household detritus feeds through my current work. The wallpapered CARAVAN was a transient space that absorbed paint and ornaments. It created another world that I could inhabit and in the last shot of its home movie is the open door with ‘home’ scrawled across it. Why I should be so surprised at these crystal clear connections is perhaps an indication of what is often staring you in the face, is the reality you can’t see. This may seem a terrible admission for an artist to make but I think Daniel Richter’s quote "Beauty through confusion and truth through collision" describes the haphazard state of discovery.