Horror Show - Fish Factory Arts, Penryn, Cornwall, June 10 - 21, 2021
Horror Show draws on stories and visual language of everyday strangeness from the past year in my individual art practice of painting, collage and assemblage. Small stories and glimpses of ordinary strangeness and uncanny everydayness that subtly shift, tilt and scew our familiar perception of the world.
The domestic setting is where all actions, emotions, sounds, snippets of conversation, objects, animals, food and images are interlinked. These elements are constantly wavering, creating chaos, comedy, horror, instability or monotony.
Over the past year I embarked on a series of paintings as a way of staying focused but also to record my thought process. The outside world felt increasingly transient and what I felt one day invariably changed the next., often making it difficult to pin down an idea or concept. There were however recurring themes of animals from ‘the outside’, pets, cooking utensils and alien-like plant-forms providing me with some reassurance. When resources were depleted, I painted, collaged and sketched on to materials close at hand, empty cereal packets, flip chart paper, whatever I could salvage.
In these paintings, the enforced everydayness provided an opportunity for weirdness to manifest itself. The house and its contents haunted itself with comedic acts or a detached eeriness. Creatures came in from ‘the outside’ helping themselves to whatever – as if this was normal. Pets lingered in corridors performing random acts of mystery, in an attempt to make us leave the house.