Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery

My work is deliberately located within the expressionistic tradition of abstract painting. A spontaneous type of organic abstraction is being explored but through a process of inversion. The formal concerns of colour and mark making are called into question and the surface disrupted and subverted through the specifics of the process of making and assembling. Layers of paint are applied in a gestural manner onto a conventionally stretched canvas. Same-size perspex panels are then used to entrap the paint against the canvas in order to influence the final distribution of marks and colour. This is a complex process akin to printing. Selected elements of the painted surface are transferred onto the underside of the perspex. The relationship between the two sets of marks is important. The perspex is mounted above the surface of the canvas so as to become the primary image. The marks on the canvas that are visible play an important secondary role as foil, background and formal reference point.

Although developed with a pictorial outcome in mind, the event of each painting's execution allows the element of chance to play a part in the process of making. The perspex and canvas act together as tools to create the image the viewer will see. The subversion of the expressionistic process through the introduction of unsympathetic materials and processes is deliberate. The perspex halts and frustrates the accumulation of marks on the surface of the canvas. It appropriates the gestural language of the canvas and offers it in freeze-frame summary. References are being made to the ethics of appropriation, questions are being asked about the nature of authentic gesture and grounds are being sought for reasserting the viability of the spontaneous mark.