Silver is a body of work built from an accumulation of primarily found objects, reused and recycled materials to create speculative landscapes. Throughout the years I have been collecting fragments, picked up from roads, parks, beaches and trinkets from travels and small objects that I’ve encountered. This series is the result of placing these collectables, with references to some of my favourite artists whose postcards I’ve collected from various exhibitions I have visited over the years. (Anselm Keifer, Marlene Dumas, Rose Wylie, Georgia O Keeffe, Lee Krasner to name a few)
Silver carries no single complementary colour and as a colour I’ve found its varying symbology intriguing , it has connotations to purity, glamour, antiquity, futuristic nostalgia and the gleam of mid-century modernism and technological advancements The recurring motif across the works are objects found around beaches near the bunkers on the Normandy coast -Gatteville Battery
The Gatteville battery was a German coastal fortification established in 1942 on the Pointe de Barfleur, on the northern tip of the Cotentin peninsula in Normandy, forming part of the Atlantic Wall defence network protecting the strategic port of Cherbourg. It comprised of four artillery gun casemates supported by a layered system of observation posts, ammunition stores, and defensive shelters, the remains of which remain visible in the landscape today.
I have been fascinated by both the history of these bunkers and the reminder of the history through the architecture itself, the monolithic structures have remained damaged and yet still striking, they have become a kind of fixed point around which everything else accumulates. Some of the objects in the paintings came from those beaches. Others did not. The distinction matters less than the fact of their gathering. The process is one of layering, repainting, and choosing to reveal elements of old lives of these past canvases, but not revealing where these distinctions always are. These are paintings about the associations objects hold, and about what it means to keep returning to the same place.
