Still Breathing, Greenaway Gallery, Adelaide Australia
August 30-September 30th 2014
These paintings are a way of holding vigil.
When I’m not painting, I work in the suicide prevention field. This body of work gathers together emotional residue and thinking from that space. Visually the work seeded from traditions around death masks. Taken into paint, I wanted these faces to hold that liminal space between the living and dead, that state distinguishable only through a fine thread of breath.
As it turns out, the paint fought hard to keep them firmly on the side of those still, but breathing.
Collectively, they form a kind of re-membering
- ‘There was a sunrise inside her’ oil on canvas 500x600mm
- ‘my breath caught on you’ Oil on canvas 500x600mm
- ‘Mountain’ Oil on canvas 500x600mm
- ‘Two hundred footsteps’ Oil on canvas 500x600mm
- ‘The winter solstice’ Oil on canvas 500x600mm
- ‘The next dawn’ Oil on canvas 500x600mm
- ‘That time of ashes’ Oil on canvas 500x600mm
- ‘As soft as her sadness’ Oil on canvas 500x600mm
- ‘They grew around each other’ Oil on canvas 500x600mm
- ‘Mountain’ Oil on canvas 500x600mm