This painting is large scale and follows my love of painting faces that
emerge and fade into paint, collage and words. I try not to rely on physical
likeness but instead paint from the inside out; revealing a sense of the thread
of our inner lives. From the personal to the universal. Intuitively led, the paint
marks over layers of collaged paper construct a kind of emotional landscape,
somewhere memories and thoughts can be half-formed but fully felt. I am
obsessed by the fluidity of our inner narratives and continuing reactions to
the world around us, something behind our eyes, flowing on below the surface of
daily life.

I like to include elements of nature and man-made buildings, streets;
the places we move through and dwell. In this painting, Nature is the main theme, flooded with handwritten, scrawled words,
maybe representing thoughts, songs and conversations as they weave in and out
of our lives.

Towards
the end of painting this piece, I suddenly felt a strong pull to write a line of
words on repeat in my head straight onto the canvas – “my dreams cannot
be contained” Sometimes an energy builds so much when painting, and it felt as
if it didn’t want to be contained, it felt limitless in a way and for a second
so did I. While personal to me, as all my pieces are, I crossed out the word ‘my’
to make “dreams cannot be contained” – no dream can be contained, not mine or
anyone’s, with energy behind it no box can hold it. I wrote the words directly
and quickly, almost without looking. There’s something about these spontaneous
moments during the creative process that I’ve come to trust, even if they seem
strange or make no sense at the time.

The title
‘Pandora’ came immediately after that; all that energy and the magnitude of our
emotions being set free from the box, for good or bad, expression and dreaming
made real.