2021 - Connection Through Spaces

The paintings and drawings in this Portfolio each subtly conveys a memory or a moment in time for specific people. Artworks are composed as an arrangement of separate canvas panels where one panel is a portrait and this hangs beside another panel which is the image or symbol of a memory. Some artworks consist of two or more portraits and two or more juxtaposing panels. The viewer is invited to look at the group of panels in the artwork and in so doing they will naturally begin to imagine their own narrative of how the panels relate to each other. They may envision underlying meaning relevant to the person or people portrayed.
For the viewer, this arrangement of individual panels triggers a physical process of repeatedly looking backwards and forwards across the spaces that are on and between the panels. The viewer is mentally constructing meaning through an action of making connections. So, on one hand, connection through spaces relates to the viewer’s interaction with the positive and negative spaces of the juxtaposing panels in order to build a storyline of what is being communicated.
Time also occupies its own negative and positive spaces and one’s act of remembering is a mental expedition from the present to a moment across time. The people portrayed in the artworks and their juxtaposing panels show the “now”, as viewed in the portrait, set against the “then” which is the panel symbolising the memory. Connection through spaces, when viewed through this lens, correlates with the sitter’s memory which exists in its own complex space, linking with their present self.