Dialogue Series

My father was a physicist, a mechanical engineer/inventor and an optics expert who died when I was fifteen years old. That early trauma was the wound I carried. In these paintings, I embedded my father’s US patent images and handwritten physics notes in a flickering field of neuronal dendrites and paint flecks. The activity of making this work opened the door to the imaginal realm within my own mind, body and psyche, where I began to integrate that loss.

Here, the painting ground acts as my ground of being, and my father’s scientific mind is invited into that visual and tactile space. Layers of encaustic generate a filmic quality that embodies memory and allows past and present to meet in one place. The painting surface becomes a place of transmutation where the wound becomes a gift.

This series is part of a larger body of work that was done for Soundings, a collaborative, multimedia exhibition that explored the construction of shared identity within four generations of my own family, through the lens of my father’s legacy. By launching this experimental show in the living laboratory of a creative family, we were investigating the subtle forces that shape who we are by the stories we tell and the memories that we keep.

‘And when I say “Show it! Show the wound that we have inflicted upon ourselves during the course of our development”, it is because the only way to progress and become aware of it is to show it.’ - Joseph Beuys