The focus of this work is a dialogue between drawn and painted images in narrative cycles and the theme of unfolding time.
The current work is an extension of the trilogy which has been in progress for a number of years:

A Confiscation of Porcelain

German Landscape with Wandervogel

The Watch

My works are concerned with the texture of a particular experienced reality; they try to define and trap a measured piece of space, and the people and objects within it. Walter Benjamin called this projected space Spielraum Once enclosed, the space anticipates and witnesses an event, or reflects on its aftermath. The pictorial frame becomes the proscenium for a Theatre of Significant Autobiographical Incidents - Auden’s ‘Emotional Milestones’

This body of work is an attempt to bind together experiences and perceptions from two generations – my mother’s and my own. Our bond had always been intense, even claustrophobic. My mother held onto me with an anxious grip, one I understood, - yet always felt bound by, I was her creature, proof of her survival.

The making of this series was my journey, it took me to Berlin
and beyond in my quest to experience the Landscape of Memory.
Physical spaces, the kind you inhabit and walk about in, feel comforted, oppressed or exhilarated by, create the texture of memories and of dreams. I was looking for the dream door which opened onto my Mother’s Berlin childhood, to experience it spatially, psychically…

To move through the domestic confines of that comfortable apartment near the Tiergarten, or the urban spaces and places she would have known then to follow her out into the German countryside as a young Wandervogel, experiencing freedom, making friends and finding a sense of belonging, discovering the mythic Teutonic landscape of Goethe, Friedrich and the Brothers Grimm.

To investigate the particularity of her culture and experience against my own English postwar upbringing and to search for allusions and fragments*… which might give visual form to the bitter ironies of my Mother’s life.

*My use and theme of The Fragment - that which is left unsaid connects me to the spirit of Romantic Irony* ‘ Incomplete by definition, a fragment may nevertheless – ironically - lay claim to a global insight and the communicability thereof; and this enhances the value not only of the ‘fragment’ itself but also of those texts in relation to which the fragment defines itself as fragmentary.’*

*Lucien Dallenbach and Christian L. Hart Nibbrig, eds. Fragment und Totalitat