Fleur Patrick, It lingered in their dreams

Fleur PEatrick is a contemporary painter, born in New Zealand in 1979 and emigrated to the UK as a child. She graduated with a 1st class Fine Art degree before completing a Painting MA at the Royal College of Art in 2003. After living in London for many years, she now lives and works in Nottinghamshire. Her work has been exhibited globally and is included in numerous private collections.Artist Statement:Throughout my career I have worked with and adapted found images, sourced from a range of mediated origins. I select imagery which is non-specific, and yet strangely familiar to me, becoming catalysts for the uncanny. This draws on and reflects my own experiences of confused cultural identity and sense of place.I apply paint in translucent glazes of colour, before wiping away to reveal previous layers. I am interested in how this process requires a negative act of paint removal to define the painting’s form and structure.The work explores tensions between the painting’s image and surface, each serving to suppress the other. As a result, clarity of images appears to ebb and flow, materializing briefly like a trick of light, only to dissolve back into more abstract form. This precarious balance resists our attempts to fully locate, enter and navigate the space of the image, as though shrouded by a veil of uncertainty. I am fascinated by that lingering ambiguity and how it actively engages an audience to ‘fill in the blanks’ from their own imagination and experience; the images become different things for different people. For me, the paintings are only successful on condition of this effect.