Outflow: Planned or unplanned, but turbulent (2015)

While working on Outflow I was less concerned with imaging a place in terms of geographic co-ordinates, and more in making visible an experience of place. An experience of place, however, may remain invisible in a place, even though it is produced in the relationship with that place.

There is a force between paintings which can make something visible that is not present in individual paintings. I consider the percept and affect that arise in series of paintings as important as those which arise in individual paintings. The six paintings that comprise Outflow were chosen for the dynamism created in their colours, forms, fields, and lack of specific focal points. The paintings that comprise Outflow came together in a structure built of paintings raised with legs. The structure functioned as a composition of multiple viewpoints of a structured landscape in a single moment. While multiple viewpoints may imply a movement, I considered the images of this movement to be of a single moment.

The word outflow has an association to me of something happening quite quickly. Of a purge, an expulsion, an ejection. An outflow could occur within the parameters of a co-ordinated, or structured path, but the passage of an outflow can also be unplanned. I understand the word turbulence in its scientific meaning, a violent or unsteady movement of a gas or a fluid based on pressure differences, but also in its metaphoric meaning, as a state of conflict or confusion.

The series of paintings, and the sculptural form of Outflow, could be considered a visual-spatial proposition on a human experience of a moment within a turbulent passage.