By painting subject matter that are the closest to me, be it family, friends, motifs of my childhood to extending my subject matter that is my ephemeral everyday like reoccurring patterns, a colour, an orange peel, my breakfast. These images endure more than just memories that live in my present. They are the quintessential makeup of my intuition. The gesture.
These layers of memories that occur in my mind are physically represented on the canvas as they come, some feel ephemeral, some vivid and some details occupy a spatial memory in my mind. The canvas is a gateway for me to explore, figure, stretch these everyday experiences. (I come to a ray of possibilities and conclusion, I cannot pinpoint at the moment what I mean by the outcome of figuring, because with hope the action of painting is how I figure life/ things out)
Thus references of my known people and places slip into each other and past each other and within the canvas they resemble both pattern and transformation (transfiguration).
What's missing in life is relationship. I seek to understand and "figure relationship with others and myself through painting experiences that have led me to understanding life's more complicated "politics "and systems and then back down to understanding conscious values, morality and spirituality, emotional wellbeing. Life is a cluster of relationship and connectivity. Small things felt and experienced, should not be dismissed as other to the extreme and big political agendas. Rather these small things are what gather to cause, radical movements, be it of consequence or not. Often life seems incomprehensible, systems seem impenetrable, and trying to provoke change and ambition feels pointless. By looking into ones own life, understanding one's own position and then to the community one sits in, I find a better perspective can be understood. The political becomes personal, or rather the political is personally realised in a way where neither of them can be dissected from each other.
From our bodies, to our bones, to our lunch and the fruit on our trees, or rather no fruit on our trees; our lives are a amalgamation of our surroundings and experiences that fluidly reside within our temple (biblical) called body.
Our lives although short and instantly over, can be likened to the frameworks of a compost or sedimentary rock. Layers of history that exist within us and when we die, we leave behind a trace for others to sift through find meaning and advise and with hope move on.
In relation to my painting similarly I treat the canvas as a record keeper of partly personal encounters, where time is non- linear and these experiences, refences, observations, speculations, thoughts, anxieties are encompassed in the compost like canvas. Painting is like tracing back and forward the past and present, drawing a variety of conclusions, (or non conclusions) for me to figure all these "small things "out in reltionship to each other.
Furthermore, the canvas, materially I prefer leaving it unstretched and it refers to a decolonial step addressing the dilemma of painting in a western terrain. It merely a symbolic act of retaining agency within the white cube space as it denies the adherence to framing a canvas for its accessible, attainable and consumable aesthetic. Also, and more importantly this aesthetic relates to the origins of western painting history superseded by the Western Eurocentric patriarchy whose power currently reigns even in areas of supposed independence.
I must not forget to add that most of rich manure of my work, its content comes from living. This is me learning to live a life that I want to lead. It is a shame that I am writing this whilst doing a masters, and possibly hypocritical. But my intention is always to be spiritually aware, emotionally aware and understand my body and learning to cave in when I've pushed myself.
Its a struggle. Especially seeing as capitalism sees that rest is not part of the equation. But bit by bit, I want to live, work and rest for my mental and spiritual wellbeing for me to ultimately be a better human, ancestor citizen so forth. My journey doesn't end here. It carries a trace to the next life, or to someone else's life.
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