My practice has grown out of the obsession we have with story telling. Every day we create stories, real ones that we drag around with us and by which we live day after day. Our psychological head-talking selves have much to say, too much to say, so that we are caught on thought. With this in mind I picture narratives of my own imagining. Space and time may be recognisable but characters undecidable. There is an uneasy intensity that prevails. Human relationships, female sexuality, reality, fantasy, loss, and mortality are recurring themes within the work.
Narratives take shape through drawing. Drawing is the language of invention and memory. I use a mixture of resources from which to draw: the self-portrait and life-drawn imagery of the people I know; photographic, appropriated and found imagery; imagination and memory. There is something honest and vulnerable but equally powerful and graphic about drawing that resonates with my subjects: an intimate crowd at a burial, young girls in confirmation dresses, a child bathing, a dying man. It is in the act of looking, being looked at and knowing too well that we are left undone, exposed. The work exists, like the snap shot, as an intimate vision of a partly made-up partly remembered scenario.
Appropriated imagery brings another layer of meaning to the work, and it leaves a trace of another story once told, another life. These resources are only a trigger to a narrative that gets pictured in paint or print. The self-portrait is another way of performing a narrative, of setting up scenarios, playing out the female character. She is most often in control. Power relationships are explored through the use of the animal; in particular the dog has become the metaphorical male. The body appears to be the place of questioning: who am I? Of what am I capable?
In painting, work is made graphic and direct. Through the layers of paint scenes are set and characters played out in domestic space. The interior is the home, the place of comfort that is in fact decidedly not so. Another form of drawing out the narrative is used in printmaking. The image is drawn and etched, re-drawn and re-etched through several stages of the print process. Most recently lithography has offered a fluid way of working in which layers of subtle tonal variation and drawn marks emerge on the surface like the scenarios themselves – remembered or imagined – that make their way from the psyche.
Memory thinks it remembered it right but there is always nostalgia, a touch of melancholia, a moody companion at the peripheral. Psychological spaces are peopled with props, often children because they are both innocent and knowing. Images rely on a ‘what is about to happen’ or a ‘what has just happened’ partly by their reference to the photograph. I am interested in the ‘knowing’ and ‘not-knowing’ experienced in a situation or scenario. Works are not documentations rather; they exist as invented and imagined drawings: uncomfortable scenarios upon which we contemplate our human selves and our place within the world.
Jessie Brennan