Please click on the thumbnails below for details about each painting.
EXHIBITION SHOTS OF WORKS AVAILABLE HERE
Summary
2021-22 Ecologies of Displacement These paintings and video installation were created as part of Ecologies of Displacement an international residency funded through The British Council and Creative Scotland, which took place in Scotland and Pakistan. The works were shown in two, two person exhibitions – along with works from my collaborator artist Farrukh Addnan – at Koel Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan (January 2022) and Summerhall Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland (August 2022).
Description: Stories from a virtual childhood home
These paintings were inspired by finding my childhood home in Ohio up for sale on the internet in 2016 by the man who had bought it from my parents in 1972. All the rooms of the house, from attic to basement were available to view online. I downloaded the lot and printed out the entire house in A3 colour prints.
Something uncanny happened when I looked at these photographs and memories started to surface. The rather banal images of empty rooms for me became stage sets where personal and historical events began to surface. Childhood memories of baking with my twin sister in the kitchen, learning a dance routine in the basement, falling off the roof aged 9, butted up against memories of seismic current events such as the Vietnam War, Kent State, or the Cuyahoga River fire.
Other works centred around places in Scotland – a house on the Isle of Lewis – I considered a house of memories that were not my own.
Painted on linen, canvas or wood panel, each painting has a substrate: a page from a recent Scottish newspaper. Many are the size of traditional broadsheet or tabloid newspapers. The use of newspaper as a material in these works is not accidental.
Old dear in the headlamps
Old dear in the headlamps (an erroneous representation)
is a two channel video installation that was part of the ECOLOGIES OF DISPLACEMENT project.
