2011-12: love notes--la vie
This cycle of small works from 2011/12 is a personal, intimate, prolonged meditation on the nature of love, eroticism, growth, loss, memory, image, identity and myth. They continue the explicit concern with hybridity, mutation, transformation, and border central to my oeuvre, and the botanic/arboreal motifs oscillate between symbolizing growth and decay, life and death, hope and dread, collapse and utopia.
Using photographs of my girlfriend and myself as source material for the work was of way for me to interrogate the idea of a border between public and private space and brought up lots of issues in critical discourse surrounding voyeurism, power dynamics, "the gaze" etc, works to subvert these, and considers how they relate to memory, narrative, identity, and fantasy. The "no-spaces" of these works creates a problematized, and poignantly contemporary, vantage point from which to examine my own deeply embedded psycho-mythologies of love and art, and the timeless mystery of the human experience of love and longing.
