Phobic Regression (Mother and Child)

Medium: Acrylic on paper
Size: 42 x 59 cm

This sequential work explores the bond between a mother and child. Faced with injections I enter a state of blind panic, getting through it only by sitting on the lap of my mother. From left to right, the pieces show the process in which the chaos around the child increases to an extent to which the mother almost disappears. However, even when everything else disappears into chaos, the mother's arm peers through and never abandons the child regardless of the destruction around them.

Blind Instinct (Mother and Child II)

Medium: ‘chunky charcoal’ on paper

Size: 3 pieces of different sizes, from left to right: 99.5 x 69.5 cm, 83.5 x 59 cm, 69.5 x 50 cm

In this mother and child triptych, the story of becoming one amidst disorder is prevalent. These pieces were drawn blindly in the dark, relying on instinct and the power of marks. The sequence of shrinking images become increasingly chaotic, the reducing size creating a claustrophobic sense and allowing the audience to see the work as moving further away and becoming unreachable. The pieces embody the sheer feeling of uncontrollable, instinctual panic associated with a phobia of needles.

hand bomb

Medium: Digital images edited in Photoshop, on paper

Size: each 29 x 41cm in exhibition, size variable

The body as a weapon against itself represented an element of dealing with grief. Not only was this work inspired by the slow burning cancer that took her, but also a fascinated my physical reaction to death. I was trying to not grieve, trying to forget something that had shaped me and will always be a part of who I am. I bottled things up and resisted grief, which the body as a time bomb portrays. Inevitability is expressed by the simmering flame progressing along the fuse.

Curatorial Rationale

I was heavily influenced by emotional events in my life, and the theme of the struggling body in relation to this. There are references to religion in a large portion of my work; My Body is a Battleground, for example, references other artworks on Saint Sebastian. By using religious imagery I wanted to associate personal and intimate feelings and experiences to a larger more universal cultural story. I was also heavily influenced by the work of Arnulf Rainer, Louise Bourgeois, and Antony Micallef, who pushed me to leave my comfort zone and explore vulnerable topics. The aim of this body of work is to provoke the audience to reflect on their own experiences, and exhibiting it has a cathartic quality for me. In the creation of the work, I dealt with an excruciating trypanophobia which I have had since I was a child. I also dealt with death in my work, as I lost someone to cancer when I was 12. Her name was L., and she was like a second mother to me. These core themes combine in a sense of helplessness, and of the body struggling against itself. I felt unable to support my family deal with the grief of losing her too. All this is represented in the figures. All of my work displays a figure (or body part in the case of hand bomb). I wanted this to create an intimacy between the work and viewer. It was vulnerable to me to portray real people - myself. I wanted to achieve this vulnerability in my exhibition as I believe that impactful art comes from vulnerability, which is what I wanted the audience to feel.

Because a lot of my work is narrative, I worked with sequences. I have works on the wall as well as on the exhibition boards, creating a very immersive space to walk into with a cave-like quality. It is hidden and protected, but the work My Body is a Battleground is very visible when descending the stairs of the building, which was a daring thing for me to do but reflects the idea of facing trauma instead of hiding it, and finding pride in this. I tried to create structure by having all the hanging figures up high to highlight its suspension and create more space between the figure and the physical ground. It makes it feel higher up as the audience is forced to look up at the piece. I placed the mother and child works closer to the bottom to have them at or even below eye-level, adding to the sense of claustrophobia and giving them more weight and physical presence.

I selected these specific works as they follow a thematic trend and are often even linked in these: some explore both phobia and processing death and loss. I also wanted to explore my topics through a range of media and in both realistic and abstract manners. This enabled experimentation with different styles, even within painting. Partially, the abstraction acted as a cloak I could mask my work in to maintain a certain sense of privacy. In the Mother and Child works, there was a strong focus on mark-making and the feelings these expressive gestures conveyed.

A lot of my work is quite physically large, through which I wanted to convey the heaviness and impact of the themes on my life, making the works feel more significant. I wanted an audience to feel overwhelmed, the same way I have felt when dealing with trauma and loss. I chose these works because I think that, whilst they could stand for themselves, they tell my story when viewed as a whole. They dive into a real-time process of dealing with grief and phobia, of discovering new perspectives, and developing as a person. The time from which these works stem mark great growth for me personally, and I believe that this selection of works is able to represent a part of this

journey.