I imagine there’s an old woman’s house, small, stuffed with a lifetime of sentimental ephemera, old photographs, cute ornaments, small craft endeavours. Fading prints clash on carpets and upholstery. Furniture has been gathered over decades. Her garden ornaments and a pond.  I am fascinated to walk into her small world of precious memories and decaying dreams.

 

My work communicates an uneasy place that sits somewhere between anxiety over my own ageing process, intense struggles with motherhood and distress at my inability to maintain an un-chaotic home, something I refer to as ‘domestic disharmony’. Juxtaposed with this gloom is a joy in vivid colour and bold pattern as explored in my past career as a fashion stylist and a magpie-like attraction to discarded or strange objects and detritus form another time. This has inspired my own collecting and some years spent as a vintage shop owner. This collision couples with a dark humour to produce paintings, drawings and collage that can spill over into installation, small sculptures and household pieces.

 

Mike Kelley described the used, home-made toys warped into his disturbing sculptures as “debased cultural products’. Once cherished, now surplus objects and dated imagery appear throughout my work, either as source material or subject matter. Home-crafts Kelley considered under-evaluated by the art world include collage and decoupage. I use these techniques to gather together unexpected combinations in a maximalist style that mirrors the vibrant chaos I experience in life.

 

Photographs of overflowing ashtrays from my home and images of cooked meat displayed in decades old recipe books are collaged into extravagant floral displays on paper or canvas, mimicking those to be found over a pensioner’s mantlepiece but with a disturbing twist. An installation has these collages as part of a living area cluttered with found ornaments and small works made from cigarette ends and puzzle books.

 

This spills over into functional domestic pieces up-cycled from found furniture. The monsterish face appliqued with leftover fabrics onto a standard lamp shade would appear incongruous in an old-time living room setting. I have hand drawn imagery taken from old-time greeting cards and ceramic figurines. They are decoupaged onto set of drawers alongside drawings of teeth, a gall bladder and a spleen, which, in contrast to the heart, are body parts associated with vitriol and spite.

 

I brought in mixing painting with collage on pieces that combine photos taken of faded shop window stickers with painted figures based on small dewy-eyed ornaments. The saccharine aesthetic of these images across the works in which they feature exhibit what I have termed ‘corrupt nostalgia’. Playing with scale of them is disorientating and removing them from the context of a charity shop or mantlepiece intends an unsettling, creepy undercurrent. to the work. This theme recurs in a painting of diagrams and toys taken from a 1970s book on toy making that float eerily in the canvas.

 

In further paintings I have introduced  a personal narrative to my work based around memories that align with the concept of corrupt nostalgia. ‘Don’t Cross The Line and ‘ One Misty Morning’ depict recollections of past stressful episodes I had soothed with the familiarity of childhood memories and home comforts, their meaning distorted as the images are scattered over the surface. I have applied the same principle to ‘Pond’, a piece made in direct response to the violent episodes that result from my youngest son’s mental health issues and the solace I find watching newts in my garden pond. Documentary photographs I have taken of the vandalism of my home are collaged around the pond to make a dense undergrowth of broken furniture, clothes slashed with knives and shit streaked toilet bowls. Reflective screens taken from the insides of smashed gaming monitors are cut into slithers to represent reeds and grasses.

 

My current work centres around old photographs found at a relative’s house. I am working on large painted portraits and collages of my grandparent’s friends, in home made fancy dress, attending old-time dancing parties at British seaside resorts. I am attracted by their home-made costumes, especially those themed around children’s nursery rhyme characters which look unsettling on jolly pensioners. There is humour and flamboyance in their outfits, with colours and patterns which have captured my eye. There is a poignant nostalgia to them alongside a re-assurance that being old can be joyful.