Flowers of the Field

In the spare room at the back of my Grandparents house, stood an old wooden wardrobe. The long, heavy drawer at its base held a treasury of family photographs dating from Victorian times.

Like pieces of an incomplete jigsaw, these photos fascinated me, and I spent hours during my childhood holiday visits, shuffling through them, looking for family resemblances: Grandma naming where she could, re-telling handed-down tales and dusty memories.

A few years ago, I came across an old photo album on a vintage market stall and so began a sort of rescuing of these lost or abandoned but once cherished, intimate containers of a family’s life.

These paintings are intended as reflections on time, family and friendship, memory and forgetting, love and loss, home and displacement.