"Paint". a product, a decorative lipstick on a surface, a sealer, a creative medium that sets off a world of narrative in ones imagination yet is simply pigment and binder on a surface. What if the paint is removed from the surface and is shown as an objective hung directly on the wall, placed on a floating plinth or in a display cabinet? Is it still painting?
In painting choreographed mounds of meat, my recent work speaks to analogies of the body as canvas and paint as flesh. "seeing Itself" offers an immersive experience in to my paintings with the intention of reminding the viewers they are animals. Large scale meat-mounds emerge from the dark space in this baroque installation at Arthaus Contemporary. In encountering the flesh of other animals reproduced at scale, indeed animals which humans frequently consume in order to survive - viewers might recognise themselves as meat. In so doing, they may be increasingly aware of the act of spectatorship as embodied within a complex system of flesh contemplating itself- conscious meat.
Regular visits to estuarine environment of Tamaki Makaurau, inform developments of the work presented. The approach take to such places attempts to paint an environment rather than to picture them as landscape.
Western painting traditions, are in particular the formulation of landscape ideas within a New Zealand context, have bound land within the frame of pictorial splendour. The shift away from a generalised and idealised view of landscape toward a relationship of body to its environment, is key to these paintings.
