Damage

Damage – this was the title of my M.A. show and seems apt to sum up so many life changing events over a period of just seven years in my life.  Seven years of study, when my husband had left me to raise our two childre, my sister died and my father had a stroke was actually, as far as producing art was concerned, a very fertile time and gave me an outlet for my mixed emotions.  This was to sustain me through a troublesome period in my life.

Much is hidden; damage and pain which we cannot see; concealed behind layers of denial or perhaps intentional self-deceit.  We are misled, misguided into a false sense of security.  There are also nastry secrets, physically eating away inside us.  If I had let it, this could have been a time of breakdown; a complete falling apart.  But with an inbuilt desire to create, my love of materials - ‘stuff’ - along with the necessity to continually produce work for my tutors, and stay operational for my children, I was spurred on. A strange beauty can exist in destruction and decay. I suppose that I found an empathy with distressed materials, their history, a passage of time. The quiet, persistent presence.