Artist Statement: Georgina Amos

The process of my work, despite detailed planning, is always unpredictable and adjustments have to be made at each stage. For me, this is the only way a specific material such as paint, can create anything new and meaningful; through seeing and learning from these controlled accidents.

Painting’s inescapable relationship to surface has inspired my recent work. I form a relief by sticking discarded packaging on to the canvas plane, and then layering a surface of acrylic colour to create a new aesthetic reading of the object. Building up further layers of paint, I emphasis the oscillation between the illusion of making a flat image seem three-dimensional and the reality of the material. I am at an exciting stage where I feel there are many areas for investigation, particularly how to define what surface actually is and when this then becomes an object.

My paintings explore the possibility of communicating through the visual. I paint by layering acrylic colours and masking areas at each stage, finally peeling away these areas to reveal the image. The shapes I mask are derived from amalgamations of forms I see in the world and are unrecognisable as any specific entity, lying between the figurative and the abstract. I am particularly interested in objects which do not communicate visually, for example; satellite dishes, street lights and telephone wires, using their visual forms to explore and re-build new understandings of their original function. I investigate the possibility of aesthetic communication to convey non-visual sensory qualities such as warmth, speed and the suggestion of movement. Movement experienced through a painting is interesting to me due to the inherent stillness of the medium.

In my work the medium of paint is not separate, but describes the content. I like to draw attention to the line or boundary between the figure and ground through the different layers of paint. The beginning and end of something is questioned as each layer leaks into the adjacent colour. Line is specific to the two dimensional in painting.

The image is hidden to me for much of the duration of the painting; all I can use is my own projection of its final composition. For me, this ‘hiddeness’ expresses the creative process, and the juxtaposition of the experience of both the visible and the masked. This idea of deciphering the apparently unreadable is vital to comprehending my work. I paint large areas of colour containing little information yet also detailed, dense images that are out of focus, suggesting an image sensed but not in its entirety seen. The concept referred to by Walter Benjamin as the ‘aura’, relating to the near and far, is particularly relevant. Localised areas of light, flies, and rain, further disrupt and guide the eye to what is meant to be being observed.

I am influenced by Prunella Clough’s paintings of industrial imagery and particularly how the viewer’s sense of location is displaced while experiencing her work. I am also interested in the materiality of paint that is central to Phillip Allen’s constructions. Most recently, the work of Howard Hodgkin and the characteristic of surface to his paintings have been important.