Interior 1 from the story Suitcase

The Interiors are based on taking one sentence or one concept from a long story /poem by Elizabeth Dancoes called Suitcase.
Elizabeth and I have worked together for many years.
Our first show if this work was in 2023.

The work is made in a unique style that has a kind of graphics or comics inspiration including speech bubbles. They owe their drama to visual arts concepts and painting, the high drama of bright colours against a dark and moodily painted background.

They owe their naïve/low relief realism to textile storytelling such as the Bayeux Tapestry and even to old fashioned child’s play such as felt boards where pieces and characters in a story are easily manipulated.

When I first read Elizabeth’s story poem Suitcase I was immediately moved to create kind of bleak interiors with a sense of ‘lost’. These were made first just quicly in paper with moodily painted backgrounds and simple cut out (like paper doll cut out) walls, rooms and hallways with single lonely figures.

Then I made them again in cloth much more simply, a set of about 9 interiors. These are more just spatial divisions but the sense of ‘emptiness’ pervades them, the two sets counter each other; blue embroidered background, dark appliquéd forms, dark embroidered backgrounds, blue appliquéd forms.

The three interiors here are part of a collection of 6. Each takes a section or a sentence or two from Suitcase where that is silkscreen onto the moodily, darkly painted background and then the one sentence of anguish that leads into the larger meaning and point of the story/poem. “Why did I let them go?”

This refers to the Persephone story, with her mother Demeter lamenting her loss.