Helen Was Happily Giddy

"Helen..." is part of a highly decorative series of work I refer to as the 'Personality Series'. It aims to both resist and court the viewers desire to read into the surface of the painting, always snapping back to the reality of the painting’s dumb materiality while asking, if ironically, what might be felt. If emotions could have a look, these paintings give them the likeness of viscera. To relate such bodily presences and hint at their human forces, they make use of painting’s Modernist history with its gestures, drips and graphic codes, perhaps dusting off in the process some of its sublime or romantic ideals, corrupted here as bathos and the camp of a by-gone era through its borrowings.

It is painted on a semi-transparent silk support so that the wood stretcher-bars, its blemishes, and the wall beneath complete the painting as a structural object.

Their high sense of ornament and design are also an attempt to make links to the highly decorative and patterned ancestral personalities, which line the walls of New Zealand meeting houses – the wharenui of the Maori.