Fleur Patrick
www.fleurpatrick.com
@fleur.patrick
Statement:
Throughout my career I have worked with and adapted found images, sourced from a range of mediated origins. I select imagery which is non-specific, and yet strangely familiar to me, becoming catalysts for the uncanny. This draws on and reflects my own experiences of confused cultural identity and sense of place.
I apply paint in translucent glazes of colour, before wiping away to reveal previous layers. I am interested in how this process requires a negative act of paint removal to define the painting’s form and structure.
The work explores tensions between the painting’s image and surface, each serving to suppress the other. As a result, clarity of images appears to ebb and flow, materializing briefly like a trick of light, only to dissolve back into more abstract form. This precarious balance resists our attempts to fully locate, enter and navigate the space of the image, as though shrouded by a veil of uncertainty. The theme of ‘Nothing has changed, everything has changed’ evokes a sense of narrative, inviting us to explore a world where these polarized states can coexist. The suggested spaces depicted in my paintings operate in a similar way. They offer points of fixed certainty while everything else is undefined and changeable. I am fascinated by that lingering ambiguity and how it actively engages an audience to ‘fill in the blanks’ from their own imagination and experience; the images become different things for different people. For me, the paintings are only successful on condition of this effect.
www.fleurpatrick.com
@fleur.patrick
Statement:
Throughout my career I have worked with and adapted found images, sourced from a range of mediated origins. I select imagery which is non-specific, and yet strangely familiar to me, becoming catalysts for the uncanny. This draws on and reflects my own experiences of confused cultural identity and sense of place.
I apply paint in translucent glazes of colour, before wiping away to reveal previous layers. I am interested in how this process requires a negative act of paint removal to define the painting’s form and structure.
The work explores tensions between the painting’s image and surface, each serving to suppress the other. As a result, clarity of images appears to ebb and flow, materializing briefly like a trick of light, only to dissolve back into more abstract form. This precarious balance resists our attempts to fully locate, enter and navigate the space of the image, as though shrouded by a veil of uncertainty. The theme of ‘Nothing has changed, everything has changed’ evokes a sense of narrative, inviting us to explore a world where these polarized states can coexist. The suggested spaces depicted in my paintings operate in a similar way. They offer points of fixed certainty while everything else is undefined and changeable. I am fascinated by that lingering ambiguity and how it actively engages an audience to ‘fill in the blanks’ from their own imagination and experience; the images become different things for different people. For me, the paintings are only successful on condition of this effect.
It's silence is my friend
61 x 46cm
Oil on panel
2022
61 x 46cm
Oil on panel
2022