Undetected Painting

This painting has a beautiful surface quality created by the mediums of gesso, ink and graphite. It’s a small and intimate work, only 20x25cm. It’s framed with a beautiful recessed box frame by my local framer Emily at The Framing House, which in itself is a work of art. References and inspiration for this work came from a seven month trip I took with my husband and children. One of our stops was New York City. After seeing a Lygia Clark retrospective at MoMA in New York in 2014 and being transfixed by the use of form in her work, I began to see shapes, shadows, recesses, and protrusions as we continued to backpack through America, Europe and Asia during that year. I walked through the streets and landscape daily, and engaged with the environment this way day after day. When I returned to my studio back home in New Zealand, my work took on a fusion of built environment and landscape elements. The process of painting, physicality of paint and surface, and the relationship between idea and painting as an object are important considerations in the work. The intersection of gestural or drawing-like line and hard-edged form, exist together on the painting surface, exploring the tension and intersection I see between urban and natural environments and the unseen or what lies beneath, like undetected murmurings.