In Time

(Exhibiting with Young Soy Gallery in May 2025)

My mother gave me some of my childhood artwork she had saved. One of them appears to be a self-portrait of myself, made at age 7. Below is that image.

I observed this 7-year-old self’s representation: the colour palette which I still quite naturally like, the slightly surreal stance which I still draw figures in, the odd chair that to present-day me, resembles a Corbusier LC4 which I like. 

I decided to see what would happen if I “re-made” that art.

The re-made “replica” quite organically and unintentionally compressed the figure of the girl, which I understood as something along the lines of time compressing memory, and memory insisting on representing itself just short of, or stepping over (sur) real. See the second image below.

As I considered the temporal qualities of this work, I saw no point to leaving the re-made self-portrait as I had made it, because it is no longer a self-portrait. I like the 7-year-old me and am on convivial terms with my memory of her but I am clearly constructing things (myths, perhaps) directly aided by image-making in the past, which is, in portrait form, was itself subject to the 7-year-old’s choices for representing something. And so, I painted over my work.

The ‘final’ piece is far more obviously an abstract (see above). I mean that as an abstract of the process, and an abstract of the representation. The colours are the same, some of the forms show up again, but it constructs itself differently. This method of taking something familiar, reconstructing it into something unfamiliar, and then disassembling it to make it something both familiar and unfamiliar is something I will remain interested in; it is in that space that real creation seems to lie, and with it, the tools to see time differently.

40h x 40w x 1.5d (inches); acrylic and oil pastels on canvas