Exhibited: New York, Bravin Lee Programs, Claire Kerr "One Thing Turns into Another" 2019 (Where purchased)
Drogheda, Highlanes Gallery, The Tyranny of Ambition, 2023
This is a painting of the press-out parts from a cardboard pin-hole camera kit – one I’ve had for a number of years but which I can never bring myself to make and so ‘lose’ all the different pieces in the assembled camera; as in some of my other paintings I find it interesting to think about the connection between constituent parts and a whole. Image making and viewing is now to a large extent digital, but the simplicity of the technical process for making a pin-hole camera is eternally appealing – at its most basic, a black (light-proof) box with a tiny hole in one side through which light passes to produce an inverted image on the opposite side of the box. This ‘camera-obscura’ effect was known in ancient times – at least two thousand years before the image produced could be fixed and kept. The pieces of course also have graphic qualities - which recall, on a small scale and in a ‘domestic’ mode, some of the familiar Big Black Shapes I associate with a particular kind of 20th century large-scale abstraction.
