I grew up on a farm in the northeast of Scotland, and the inherent cruel hierarchies of the environment around me, provide me with a rich source of imagery.It is an arena ripe for metaphors and Orwellian allegory. From the harsh reality of the countryside I conjure up a hallucinatory painted world of birds, beasts, people and children. Buildings have a sense of foreboding, or of a dangerous past, one which is out of bounds to me as a child, and of stories told to me of, children in the newspapers drowning in slurry pits, and places where we shouldn’t play, a place dangerous to adults and children alike.The work addresses the wound in the paint's textures of welts, scars, drips, sagging and stretch marks, bruises and lumps. They are bright and glossy as fresh scabs and bruises. I use photographs of my childhood home, tabloid and magazine images, the everyday sensational and the horrific mundane cut and pasted, re-visioned in a makeover of Technicolour paint. The wounds in the painting ground are also the lacunae of the text; the fragmented images are like cautionary fairy tales set in post-industrial landscapes.
The spiky lines of pylons, chicken wire fences and trees cut into the landscapes menacingly. The recurring motif of the suburban house in candy colours recalls the sinister gingerbread house, while cut down or uprooted trees seem to call a warning to immaculately dressed, idealised innocent children, curious as cats -a suspenseful premonition of loss of innocence. The lurid, acid colours of the landscapes are like scars of pollution, with the beauty of the synthetic. Fontana's advocation of the eradication of narrative content is refused in all of its posthuman horror:
“Fontana’s invitations to infinity to assert itself implicitly involve the annihilation of the world of forms and individuals; they seem to reflect the horror of world-devastating war as well as the onset of nuclear endgame weaponry.”
The paintings pick at emotional scabs - that mentally revisit the site of the trauma which is necessary to recovery; they seem to be positioned within the process of healing. The work re-envisions sublimely, the gaps are there for the viewer to fill in, the wound as trace of action embodying the memory of an event.
