ABOUT MY WORK

When I was young, sitting in the backseat of our little four-door family car, I would stare out of the window at other families on the road and wonder where they were going, what they were talking about, if their lives were anything like that of my own family. Portraiture has always captivated me as a way of communicating the stories (real or imagined) of friends and strangers alike.

Just as writers write what they know, I choose narratives most like my own: young women early in their career, some the children of immigrants, some migrants themselves building a home in a new country. I am born of a story of migration, and with this comes an attraction to questions of origin and identity, assimilation and autonomy. I am also fascinated by the female experience. Birth, youth, coming-of-age, marriage, motherhood: these ordinary rites of passage, universal even in a diverse cultural landscape, capture my imagination.

I paint in high contrast, using a limited palette, and exploring the full range of light and dark of one or two overriding colours. The representations are naturalistic, but not so precise that age, race or background are immediately evident. My work in 2005/6 focused on the face, enlarging it to heroic proportions. My more recent work zooms out of the face to reveal a social context, where costume and ritual are illuminated but remain incomplete. It is this balance between the very specific (an ear or hand just so) and the ambiguous that most defines my own experience, and so that I attempt to explore in my work.