Trompe I’oeil
Dr. Lise McKean has coined the phrase ‘palette of utopia’ to describe the visual and conceptual aesthetic of my work. The visual aesthetic of queen of luxuria’s palette links my performance and visual arts practice together. The palette was originally inspired by the landscape of Iona, an island on the western coast of Scotland. Growing up in Glasgow, Scotland in the seventies and spending the school holidays on the Isle of Iona imprinted an early understanding of the distinction between a utopic and a dystopic landscape.
The painting backward series is a commentary on perception and how we create value, how we create systems of equality and draw attention to what is left behind. I draw inspiration from textiles to consider the hierarchical status between fine art and the crafts. In these works I often take a craft process, for instance, the queen of luxuria costumes where used to create the fine art paintings from 2010 – 2014 as part of the Dream Minds project. In the Dream Minds paintings I took the negative shapes of the costume patterns I cut and created paintings that spoke about the disgarded, the rejected and the abandoned. When these pieces have been exhibited I install them in the interstitial spaces of a gallery or museum. The most recent work in this series is a group of trompe l’oeil paintings inspired by prints based on the women I have interviewed for the Spare Rib Revisited project. These have been exhibited in group shows at Woman Made Gallery in Chicago (December 2019) and the Alpineum Gallery in Lucerne, Switzerland December to January 2020). This latest sequence of paintings are thinking about how equality is formed and thinking about ideas related to equal distribution, in equal measure and paying attention to detail.