Paintings shown here (images 1-6) deal with spaces created by mirrors, which propose anomalies around reflectivity, transparency and opacity; and with internal repetitions and thresholds, which heighten a sense of looking and having that gaze returned, or deferred. Some multiply perceptions of space, mingled with feelings of both familiarity and displacement. As depictions of mirrors, they would reach out to include suggestions about the space the viewer occupies. Images 7-12 show paintings from a series concerned with wrapped commodities which can be bought in London’s East End: cheap wholesale fashion from Whitechapel, and bouquets of flowers from Columbia Road flower market. Painted in a monochrome orange, a mixture of magenta and lemon, constituent colours of the photographic process, their cellophane wrappings reflect and capture surrounding light, both offering and withholding their contents. The space of a bouquet, has its own fragile architecture, a vortex of flowers and foliage trapped in cellophane, just as massed clothing is both voluminous and collapsible. The paintings present this space as collapsed, yet virtual, a skin upon a surface. This image as a ‘skin’ may recall the retinal after image, or early photography, such as the salt prints of Fox Talbot, or early colour positives.
