Let’s Pull Things Apart Together - 2021

A culmination from the RESIDENCE program at Footscray Community Arts.

RESIDENCE is a residency program run by the Footscray Community Arts where artists are supported to develop their practice and create new works in the heritage Henderson House studios, and become a part of the Footscray Community Arts community.

I was the artist in RESIDENCE program from April 2021 - November 2021, with a lot of lockdowns in between.

Painting has a long history of being a male-dominated artistic medium where women and their bodies were either subjects for ‘the greats’, or played the romanticised role of the muse. However, women have been painting for centuries – they have just been historically overlooked and uncelebrated throughout the years, especially women of colour.

Instead of starting from a blank canvas, my practice includes selecting, buying and collecting unwanted and discarded whole paintings, from friends, charity shops and markets.

By choosing to de-frame, re-paint, re-frame and then re-define an existing painting is to demand space where there was none, to add a new time dimension to an existing one.

The physical act of adding a painting on top of another image or painting is to add layers of time, space, place and history instead of creating a wholly separate figurative world – rejecting the notion of ‘othering’.

This rejection is the driving force behind my artistic practice as I seek to create works that do not explicitly showcase my identity but rather, allow the action of reclamation to be my agenda. My painting practice explores the emotional & psychological aspects of a person’s life, and is informed by my own personal quest to find my place in the world as a migrant settler in Australia.

Painting new paintings on top of old paintings is a way to create spaces on existing ones, understanding that the present is made up from elements of the past. Painting directly on top of another painting is not about erasing the past, but creating a new perspective, a mosaic of things that makes a new place.