The series of works selected for this exhibition tell the stories of individuals whose voices would otherwise go unheard – women and children struggling with poverty, refugees from deprivation and war, and homeless people struggling for survival on the streets. I set out from the start in my practice more than ten years ago to focus mainly on certain key themes – women and children in poverty, homelessness and displacement – and to harness my passion around these topics to help the victims of these conditions by advocating on their behalf. As an artist, a key part of my role is to highlight social issues by depicting them in my work, in an attempt to draw the public’s attention to the challenges involved.
The core approach in my figurative work is to convey a narrative – to draw the viewer into the story of the subject or subjects by provoking an imaginative response, as well as an emotional one. Take, for example, the very early works Madonna and Child and Madonna and Children. These draw the viewer’s focus onto women in Asia living in conditions of extreme poverty and deprivation and seek to elicit an emotional response by referring obliquely to the underlying narrative of the subjects. In Madonna and Child, the subject is a young woman of nineteen holding her third child, after the first two had already died in tragic circumstances. The viewer will not necessarily know the story behind the work but they should get a sense of the subject’s predicament from looking at the image.
From a technical perspective, there is a central idea running through my works; this is quite simply the search for an ever-deeper understanding of the possibilities that painting in thread can offer.