I spent a decade and a half fan-girling, trying to cast a dialogue between myself and the European romantics and surrealists. So far away from it all in my tin shed in Bendoc, starry eyed pawing through picture books that claimed everything notable that has ever happened in art. Those epic masterpieces slowly lost their gleam when I came to know how those books had romanticised nazi sympathisers, eugenicists, orientalists, elitists and misogynists. All wrapped up as something sublime and intellectual, under the gold leafing was the stink of colonial empire. Whether I choose it or not, I am inevitably shackled to its aftermath, pining to the museums that house bloodshed, and the truth of what really was the cost of all that glory.
There’s a continuous and awkward tension between three elements in my work: the way I want my paintings to look aesthetically, what I’m capable of producing, and what I want the act of painting to feel like. Slow Explosion is vehemently for the latter.
When you are in the business of making pictures, symbolism follows you around like a shadow. This came on a day when I was particularly weighed down by this, and I just wanted to do, be, paint like myself (whatever that is) without everything attached. The truth is that my MFA has drawn strings onto everything. Part of ‘everything is intrinsically
connected’ underpins all of my work, and part of it has gone so far that I cannot work independently from… well, anything. Another truth is that there is nothing I can change about the things to which I am connected to, only those which I orient myself towards.
When I talk about wanting painting to feel a certain way, I am still talking about those old oil painters. Dali, Turner, Delacroix, Goya and Bacon. I imagine how buttery it must feel to have a painting flow out of you with such righteousness. Such vigour. When it comes to oil painting, I’m jealous, meek and female. Annoyingly forgetful of all that I know.
Slow explosion is both a running back to – and a theft. Yet a theft of something never owned by Delacroix, but by his subjects who would likely never seen a cent of that fame.
A faded print of Horses coming out of the sea hung in my toilet for years. I stare at it longingly in private. Alone in my studio I tried on his clothes. I am guilty of loving these masters, I run back to him like a victim. I wanted to love like he fraudulently sold the way that he loved. Theatrically. What power he holds over me that I must go through him to find myself. Continuously. Years ago, I made a similar work about Whitely and a teacher told me that “eventually we stop making work as a reaction to other artists and find our own way of saying what we want to say”. I felt in that moment that it was possible to stop chasing a past that I was never even part of. But I feel differently now.
Slow Explosion is now a symbol of what the act of painting means to me, how it tells me more about myself than speaking or listening. How it keeps me tied to history through the lens of the present. How I am malleable and both utterly in and out of control of the trajectory of my own life. `
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