A project coming out of an investigation of derelict homes in West Cornwall, resulting in a series of paintings, an 'estate agency', writing & photographic research... Through many conversations, I became aware that people in West Cornwall often ‘feel like they are living in a museum’. This led to a fascination with the derelict houses up amongst the moors of West Penwith. This work is part of a series of paintings and installations that have come out of this enquiry, looking to tell a different story to the one of tin mines and bottled heritage. As I worked I found myself becoming absorbed by one particular site – Springs Farm, returning to it again and again, fascinated by the detritus of living that was strewn about the crumbling building. Initially I approached the site through photography. Gradually however I was led back to painting - the materiality of the site demanding a visceral reworking or re-presentation that avoids the impersonal gaze of the lens and the commodification of heritage. The processes involved in painting, the life of the material itself have become a metaphor to deal with our shifting relationships to time |
and place, to those allusive memories that one moment we can catch and the next are gone only to re-emerge in some other shape at some other moment in time.Life itself is a bit like that. This project forms the basis of my inquiry over the two years of my MA at University College Falmouth (2009/10). Looking back on my work over the years, the main line of enquiry seems to be related to issues to do with time and place, with identity, culture and heritage. How do we relate to the past? What does it say about who we are in the present? Is there a need to ossify the past, to preserve every fragment of past lives in order to give us a sense of who we are as individuals, or as a society today? |
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