Kristian Purcell & Valerie Weir

First Class Teas, Cambridge

A new show of my work has opened at First Class Teas, Peas Hill, Cambridge (by the Guildhall and Arts Theatre).

A joint show with Valerie Weir, it dispays some of my recent portraits and abstract works.

The show runs until the first weekend of January 2009.

My work is concerned with memories and images that seem somehow burnt on to the retina of my mind’s eye. I’m searching for a visual language that conveys the essence of a familiar person or situation that still carries meaning long after it has passed, trying to render the remnants that we are left with once the moment is gone. The finer details fade so quickly, but a sensation remains. I’m increasingly looking for my work to act as echoes of moments in my life. Maybe it’s a way of holding on to things.

I am preoccupied with this sensation: it hangs on like the glowing embers of a fire waiting to be re-ignited by a chance reference or random moment of a dream. Sometimes this doesn’t happen, or sometimes it happens so late that all we are left with is the feeling of absence of a memory, a vacant lot from which every last detail has departed. The random mark-making and spontaneity in my work obscures the details and allows me to explore the spaces in-between areas of detail.

The colours that I use – the browns, reds, oranges, greys and blues – strip the images of a naturalistic appearance. Things that should be dark are instead sometimes an intense red, sometimes they have their painted surface stripped away to reveal the lighter surface of the canvas. The lack of naturalism, alongside the random mark-making and still visible lines of construction, holds the images firmly in the realm of painting.

Though photography is sometimes a source, actual memories of situations, people and performances are increasingly become the source of my work. The photos I do use are often my own or those of friends, taken on mobile phones or in social situations. Photography and memories are interwoven in the modern world. They take the place of memories for us, and fill in gaps – how many of us have photographs of situations we would be too young to remember but feel like we can actually remember being there because of the photo. This happens with stories too, and the visualisation of situations we weren’t in, or the images conjured by reading, are things I look to draw from in the future.

Just a quick note to say I have a new blog that will be regularly updated with new works and thoughts on www.kristianpurcell.blogspot.com.

 

You won't find the Cambridge based In Situ: Theatre Company in a theatre, they specialise in environmental theatre and their performances are adapted to or inspired by the space in which they perform. A normal suburban house, a Leper Chapel, an Iron Age fort, and many other enivronments have seen peices developed and performed within them. My first contact with the company came in 2006: a performance of Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler in a bungalow in a village outside Cambridge. The main play happened in one room while the off-stage characters roamed around the house giving a mixture of performace and commentary: elaborating on the chracter in a kind-of 'to camera' way that shows awareness of the audience without participation, or developing a theme within a character in a closed room, or revealing an action mentioned but not shown in the play itself. There were so many memorable moments in the performance I wanted to capture something in a painting and the result was 'Lovberg', the character had lost the manuscript that would see him realise his potential in a drunken haze and these tensions were enacted in an off-stage scene in a bathroom. Loveberg was pinning up phot-copied images of himself in his youth on the walls and bemoaning himself for losing something so important. The painting shows the bathroom and the pinned up pictures and the back of the actor's head in the bathroom mirror. Part of the way that the company develope their actors skills in reacting to the environments they are place in is in weekend or week long courses in a particular location. Autumn 2007 saw them spend a week in Llandudno, North Wales, and I accompanied them as Artist-in-Residence. The fruits of that week are displayed tonight at the house they often use for performances, 23 Wycliffe Road, Cambridge, along with some of my other work. The pieces In the Hall of Glaine Orme and The Audience in my painting gallery are from that commission. Kristian, Friday 22nd August 14.20 www.insitutheatre.co.uk/