2015 Loose Change exhibition - Artist Statement
When I was very young, the fine golden curls made by the plane in the hands of my uncle as he ran it over a beam of oak or pine, were fascinating. I picked them off the floor, wanting to keep them so I could go on enjoying the way they looked instead of throwing them on the fire - although they did look very good flaring up on the red coal embers.
Now, as I find myself immersed in the digital world with information everywhere at my fingertips - and still surrounded by nature with all its weather and birdsong - there is so much with which to play. Bits of bark, fragments of fabric, bus tickets, city maps, household packages, stamps, postcards, shells and stones – collecting, saving. Often they are simply attractive things, sometimes saved for something helpful – like all the silver foil we collected when I was a girl for “Guide Dogs for the Blind” or the “Royal National Lifeboat Institution,” gas tokens or Green Stamps. Put together, artfully arranged, they tell stories, carry memories, serve as travel diaries, and create visual novellas.
I am collecting, arranging, improvising and playing with stuff in a world of parts – making it go together into something that has not been seen before. Working to trigger the imagination and please the eye, to reward and provoke, to be still and reveal itself more fully over time. I am still a painter using bits and pieces as well as coloured sticky stuff. I am a maker. It is all from this world, it is all real.
When I was very young, the fine golden curls made by the plane in the hands of my uncle as he ran it over a beam of oak or pine, were fascinating. I picked them off the floor, wanting to keep them so I could go on enjoying the way they looked instead of throwing them on the fire - although they did look very good flaring up on the red coal embers.
Now, as I find myself immersed in the digital world with information everywhere at my fingertips - and still surrounded by nature with all its weather and birdsong - there is so much with which to play. Bits of bark, fragments of fabric, bus tickets, city maps, household packages, stamps, postcards, shells and stones – collecting, saving. Often they are simply attractive things, sometimes saved for something helpful – like all the silver foil we collected when I was a girl for “Guide Dogs for the Blind” or the “Royal National Lifeboat Institution,” gas tokens or Green Stamps. Put together, artfully arranged, they tell stories, carry memories, serve as travel diaries, and create visual novellas.
I am collecting, arranging, improvising and playing with stuff in a world of parts – making it go together into something that has not been seen before. Working to trigger the imagination and please the eye, to reward and provoke, to be still and reveal itself more fully over time. I am still a painter using bits and pieces as well as coloured sticky stuff. I am a maker. It is all from this world, it is all real.