The Frontiers
. Bold, lurid colours confront the viewer, yet the portraits hold a quiet melancholia, which unravel over time. The initial innocence of which the paintings seem to embody becomes subverted; what appeared to be a smile becomes a tense, awkward expression. Using toxic coloured paint I disfigure traditional portraiture through a process of application and removal. This is led by a fascination with corrupting and fusing the boundaries of what a face is expected to be. Synthetic colours and glossy textures are somehow capable of referencing the body; hair, veins, blood and skin. 
 
“The grotesque is defined by what it does to boundaries, transgressing, merging, overflowing, destabilizing them. Put more bluntly, the grotesque is a boundary creature.” (Tony Godfrey, Painting Today)
 
Intrigued by contemporary western culture’s desire for the tangible and aesthetic; I hope to question the solid nature of that which we fix our hopes in. Colours and painterly marks which reference decay, mould and blood imbue a sense of things gone wrong. Like plastic, paint has the potential to be warped and manipulated into seemingly endless forms, its value determined by the visual and practical uses of its outcome. “[Plastic] can become buckets as well as jewels. Hence a perpetual amazement, the reverie of man at the sight of the proliferating forms of matter, and the connections he detects between the singular of the origin and the plural of the effects.” (Roland Barthes, Mythologies)