"Home Sweet Home" series

“Home Sweet Home is a series that builds on my recent interest in the concept of shelter and is part of an ongoing exploration into the fragility and chaos of humanity.

Shelter is a word that embraces ideas surrounding safety – physical and emotional.

It speaks of healing, a safe space to recover from life’s traumas, large and small; a space to reflect and ponder.

We build our house to shelter in and yet that house, just like our bodies and our psyche, can be weak and vulnerable to attack and decay.

The structures in the paintings talk of strength and safety but at the same time false trust, misguided faith. Things are not as they seem. Areas are just a little discordant, a little off.  Not quite picture perfect.

Geometric areas of transparency hint at other structures, urban landscapes and also reflect previous experiences, previous hurts and previous ‘shelters’.  They can be viewed as afterimages.

Each of us has a different truth, a different view, a different take on even the same experience. Most of us have scars.

I’m interested in our strength as well as weaknesses, our coping mechanisms and survival techniques, tolerance and the need to retreat sometimes to safe shelter, to Home Sweet Home.”

 

Pocket Edition, Northart Gallery, 2016