MA SHOWS

My practice revolves around investigation of the ontological state of paint in the form of a brush mark on a flat surface, and its ability to be a self-representative object when taken out of a framed context.

My practice-led experimentations take the form of paintings. The work focuses on the relationship between form and colour. Form has an undeniable hold over the viewer's eye and can narrate its feelings through shape, whilst colour works as a tool that can add behavioural characteristics to that form. The theoretical understanding of this concept comes from Wassily Kandinsky’s colour theory, which states that ‘This unavoidable influence and mutual relation between form and colour causes us to observe the effect which form has on colour’.

Every layer consists of thought, both learned and tacit, through actions and processes. The forms are beginning to lose some of the sharp taped out edges and, in chosen areas, beginning to embody the natural playfulness of the medium, which pictorially sits in contrast to the more mechanical, ‘man-made’ edges, which adds a different value to the composition. A form defines itself by its edge, and the visual appearance of that edge determines the placement of the form in the picture plane.

Furthermore, the research began looking into the philosophical side of my practice. I have decided to focus on the reasoning behind the brush stroke having an ability to materialise a certain character on the canvas and how that ability is lost when the brush stroke is removed from the surface.

In order to understand the physical, 3- dimensional brush strokes, I have investigated the concept of the sublime via the writings of Kant and Lyotard, whose position is ‘it is something that consciousness cannot formulate’, which means that a brushstroke can only be understood and investigated when the physical body is created.