HOME

What is home? How do we define it? The artist first left her home for a significant period aged four, subsequently when she was 18, 23, 28, 30, 37, 42… Home, having a home – and considering it essential – became a concern. Because she senses dislocation as a disruption, home is also a place of quiet.

These were years of wandering. Wanderjahre in every sense of the word because they flagged up a connection between experiencing place and representing place. There is a tactile connection between being in a place and creating a version of it.

So: Landscapes – and painted landscapes – are home because they are physical surroundings as well as an environment that the artist can attempt to recreate. She has been there. felt the air, trod the ground. Taking a brush, mixing pigments, composing an image is a process comparable to walking, setting one foot in front of the other, stopping to look, turning back or scanning the horizon to note the curve of a river or an ancient path, hushed grasses or baked fields. Absorbing history, culture – osmotically.

Essex is her first landscape: this is what she remembers. She returns often to the rivered reeds she first saw as a child. Marguerite Yourcenar put these words into the memoirs (made from memories) of the Roman Emperor Hadrian: „the true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself.“ Essex.

Because she remembers landscape as a forcefield, she looks for its force everywhere. In new environments. Bruxelles, the Via Appia Antica. Sometimes, it is what she is able to paint. But it is not stable, not an essence. It is mutant and adjustable for everyone – anyone. It is a new vision layered, infused with history and historical documents, photos, by sketches and with words that rustle up an approximation of what she saw, what she sees.

People, too, are home. The artist’s parents on whom features are drawn with lines from their letters and overlaid with the colours she sees when she remembers them. The hill of a nose, the slope of an eyebrow are faces seen as landscapes.

Still lives are the third (possible) corner in an artist’s representational index. A horizon of glasses, bottles, jugs calls up kitchens in homes long left behind. Or the Utilitas of a Roman kitchen, an installation, dusty, at an exhibition.