AVALANCHE

21st November - 6th December 2020

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“... art, if it is to be truthful, must also reflect decay.” - Ernst Fischer

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There is a flower for every occasion; symbols of empathy, flowers act as conduits and vessels for our thoughts, emotions, feelings and memories. This body of work emerged out of an avalanche of experiences. Specifically: infertility, IVF treatments, wedding, birth, cancer diagnosis and surgery. These experiences traversed that landscape that sits somewhere between joy and fear/love and death. In this ambiguous landscape, some events are to be celebrated, others to be endured. Flowers are called upon during these events as decorations or distractions.

Ten years ago, I would sit drawing flowers after long days spent at the studio arguing with paintings. It was a way to relax, tune out and reset. Two years ago, between my wedding and the birth of my daughter I was diagnosed with cancer. Whilst healing between operations, I found myself drawing on photography prints - again, a way to relax, tune out and, this time, to ignore the pain. I would sit and explore mark-making, responding intuitively to the shapes and colours of flowers. Recently, this mark-making has been influenced by the drawings of my niece and daughter, and the exquisite freedom of their pens on paper without an impetus to create something perfect, but nonetheless beautiful.

Avalanche extends and expands on these drawings, on the respite they offer me. These works are an attempt to explore the portal between pain and creativity, linking fragility and trauma to beauty and resilience. Flowers remind me of stars, they are spectacular poems of beauty and decay - simultaneously alive and dead.