STATEMENT OF INTENTION
My studio practice is concerned with the process wherein the photographic image remediated through the discursive and lyrical filter of painting can expose latent meaning. The consistent thread throughout my practice has been an investigation of the interstice between fact and fiction in our contemporary life mired in quotidian minutiae, documentation and embellishment. My interest in this type of parafiction, as well as non-linear narrative structures, is an attempt to pinpoint the overlaps between the tangible and intangible, the conceptual and visceral, the forgotten and remembered, and the public versus private.
From 1997-2015 my work mined the landscape of the common, the mundane, the banal, and the fragmented as they are presented in the context of notation, documentation, memory and the accidental image. It navigated the intersection of the overabundant surveilled image and the poignancy of the intimate vignette or home movie. This exploration of domestic space drew on implied narratives and contexts which were generated on the margins, between the images and outside the frame. The resulting images appeared disjunctive and out-of-context, alluding to the lost images on a roll of film, the in-between moments and the throwaway image - the mistake.
More recently, these interests have extended into the afterlife of the image once it outlives its original context and owner. My ongoing project, Nobody's Keepsake, traces what happens to intimacy and memory once they become a commodity using found photographs after they pass through the secondhand economy of online marketplaces. Sourcing images exclusively through eBay sellers who scavenge thrift stores and estate sales, the work considers the strange, often-overlooked labour of those who sort through the visual remains of strangers' lives and decide what is worth saving and selling back into the world. As with previous work, these images undergo an alchemy of remediation that offers new reads beyond their original documentary function. Situated within a wider culture of isolation, ageing populations, and the erosion of intergenerational memory-keeping, the project asks who takes custody of memory once its original owners are gone, and whether this quiet commerce has become one of the few remaining rituals for handling what is left when no one is left to keep it.