Art for Relief II

‘This series of work was made this summer, during a residency in rural Suffolk. I was interested in the incredible rampant growth of organic matter, in plants and animals alike, which in its variety and rapidity seemed somewhat alien. I hoped to capture some of this feeling in this painting; although these organic processes are vigorous and beautiful, the writhing force which with life propagates itself is, too, uncanny’.

In painting I have found not only a medium, but a subject too. The act of representing something is philosophically rich, problematic even, but it is the mutability (and subversion) of representation possible in painting that I am driven by – the fact that figuration is plastic, that recognisability is malleable. I tend to approach painting quasi-scientifically, viewing my subject matter as just matter to be inflated, stretched, mutated, dissolved, cartoonised or abbreviated. Using ambiguous, hybrid, morphic forms, I aim to reach the place where language’s categorical impulse fails, and thereby explore liminal, non-binary states of being. I do not an attempt to skew recognisability through reduction – this is not a journey into abstraction, but a journey out of categorisation. - Rosalind Howdle