Fragments at Northern Lights Studios
‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins'
(T.S. Eliot The Waste Land 1922)

These paintings are fragments taken from European art history. I am very interested in the way images can become detached from their original moral and social contexts and can be re-visited by contemporary viewers.
The original paintings are beautiful as objects and surfaces but now seem very alien to our modern attitudes or tastes. I have chosen to focus on scenes that are ambiguous or disturbing. The status of the original paintings as ‘Art’ often obscures these darker narratives.
As this group of paintings developed I became very interested by individual ‘types’ or characters and how they could be used as ‘players’ within a field of action. The model here is Reality TV, a sort of I Am a Celebrity Get Me out of Here; the Art History Episode or Naked Attraction, in the Garden.