Backseat (2023)

“Backseat” is an intimate exploration of the phenomenological relationships of people to the homes they inhabit. Drawing on my personal experience in familiar place as subject matter, I used Bachelard’s Theory in his work ‘The Poetics of Space’. (Bachelard, 1958) as a theoretical framework to uncover the experience of home as an embodied encounter. As an object, chairs blur the line between objects and humans, often becoming a character to occupy an otherwise empty space’ (Fielding, 2019) . In this series of paintings, I used chairs as a motif to unify the two entities: the phenomena and the self. They become a marker to document what once was, their own presence and the absence of the person using them.

Thick layering of paint scratched back, simultaneously covers, and exposes the hazy memory of these lived experiences. The impasto surface becoming an intimate study of colour as each blend on top of each other as memories of home blend into one. Inspired by Elizabeth Cummings rich colour palette, she blurs the lines of the abstract and the representational. Susan Rothenberg for interesting composition particularly the skewed viewpoints. And expressionist painters like Francis Bacon, Leon Kossof and Frank Auerbach.