A Recurring Thought
2022-nowPaintings about memory, daydreams and impossible space
In spring 2022 I spent a month in the south of France, where I began a project that has now run for over four years. I wanted to paint a thought that has recurred since childhood: a chair in motion. In this vision the chair is moved up and down, nonsensically, by a mysterious figure who is never pictured, but whose actions I feel and visualise.
The vision would visit me in daydreams, when I felt safe and relaxed. It felt familiar, precise, repetitive and reliable, yet uneasy too: it lived by its own rules, a constant loop in impossible physical space.
“A Recurring Thought” is an attempt to understand every angle of this experience: the calm I enjoyed while visualising, the path of movement of the chair, the sense of impossible physicality, the surrounding space and light sources, and the feelings of the person moving the chair.
Although the original thought was always identical, each painting shows a different moment or viewpoint, sometimes worked from sketches of sketches, sometimes fresh from the vision itself. In the earlier paintings most visual elements are abstracted; in the recent paintings the chair and its movement become more recognisable.
Over the course of the series, the scene has been permanently transferred from my imagination to the canvas. I seem to have worked it over enough times that my mind no longer visits this place in daydreams as it once did. The vision has found its permanent home in the paintings.
