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A note about painting

The painting process could be described as thinking and sensing through the handling of materials in contexts. The painting process, the materials used, the compositions that form, and the combinations of paintings I make, offer chances to think about and sense aspects of the world.

Although paintings affect the body, their making can be influenced by a wide, unwieldly and convoluted relationship of ideas and experiences. My painting process takes place in relation to ideas about, and anecdotal experiences of aspects of the world I see, feel, and think about. My work is largely informed by ideas pertaining to the formation of assemblages, and how humans are intertwined with the non-human in the formation of assemblages. While human bodies have an extreme influence on the world around them, the processes and events that shape the world are varied and entangled, and environments are co-constituted by the relations that open through affecting human and non-human bodies. The approach I take when thinking about environments, however, does not create a separation between nature and culture. Nature, as Erik Swyngedouw proposes, can be understood as being socio-environmental arrangements. This idea around socio-environments resonates with the way I think about my work as a painter and about my paintings as objects and processes: A painting arrangement that is not just of paint, or of ideas and experiences, or of a culture, or in a context and environment… but is a form and a process that is the result of, and is a part of, an assemblage which is co-constituted by multiple parts.

The intertwining of the broader painting-related processes and the specific painting objects provides a way to spark thinking about the complex formation of environments that remains sensitive to what painting offers: the ability to work beyond language in the sensing of our place as humans in the emergent relationships that constitute socio-environmental arrangements. Although we have a limited ability to understand all aspects of the world, we do navigate this uncertainty in terms multiple forms of understanding. Our meaning making through relationships of affect, the way we respond to the world as sensing and perceiving humans, allows a painting to create a bodily awareness in the viewer of aspects of the world.

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