ReCollection
Glasgow, 2022
Prompted by memories of family holidays in the Northeast of Scotland and, more generally, of a childhood growing up in Glasgow, the artist curates a mixture of small figurative works and large abstracts in oils.
With influences as diverse as Gerhardt Richter and Sarah Graham, her practice exploits the malleable nature of oil paint to mirror the slippery nature of memory, obscuring, distorting and changing the image fragments on her boards to create ambiguous images, prompting the question “how much of our recall is accurate?”.
Using memories of scenes from her childhood holidays spent in an old fisherman’s cottage and from the small harbour at the end of the street, the artist produces large abstract paintings of zoomed-in, partially remembered details of these recalled locations.
Punctuating these specific memories of place are smaller representations of more general childhood recollections of toys and sweets familiar to any child growing up in Glasgow in the 1970s. Although the paintings themselves are small, the segments of the subjects represented are all larger than life-size, setting up an interesting dichotomy between the two sets of work.
