Porous: Portraits of Dissolving Identity

These paintings begin with the language of the historical portrait: the formal pose, the costume, the theatrical lighting, the composed expression and the authority of the painted sitter rendered in oil paint on canvas. Yet something has gone wrong. Faces dissolve, stretch, fragment and become entangled with lines, membranes, shadows and abstract forms. Bodies appear to merge with their surroundings; identities become uncertain; familiar expressions are interrupted by something irrational and unknowable.

Historically, portraiture has been used to tell us who someone is — projecting their status, wealth, power, gender, profession or place within society. These paintings take that supposedly stable image of the individual and allow it to become unstable. The distortions are not simply acts of destruction. They behave more like psychic extrusions from an interior world. A face may become a landscape, a thought, a biological form, a memory or an abstract system. Lines spill beyond the boundaries of the body as though the sitter can no longer contain what-ever is happening inside them. The grandeur of historical portraiture is deliberately undermined by strange transformations: a distinguished figure becomes almost animal-like; a face folds into an impossible geometry; a formal costume becomes a theatrical disguise. The fragmentations serve to unmask the performed identity of the sitters to maybe reveal their psychological state and less constructed self.

The paintings sit somewhere between reverence and irreverence — attracted to the beauty and authority of the old masters while questioning the certainty of the subject they project. The series What Lies Within can be seen as works of identity becoming porous. They ask what remains of people when the recognisable faces, the social costume and the conventions used to describe them begin to break apart. Rather than presenting a fixed individual, they present identity as something unstable, performed and continually being rewritten.

Original paintings and limited edition prints available for acquisition. Inquire to purchase.