Some are very specific, others are more of a response to the hues we’re surrounded by in our daily lives. Take an older work, for example, Order, Oscillation, and Pretence Gesture (Shape Green). In 2013, I wanted to make a red painting because I find warm colours a more difficult palette to handle. I was reading Swiss artist Johannes Itten’s theory on colour at the time. He designated a shape to each of the primary and secondary colours – green is a rounded triangle because it is the result of combining blue (a circle) and yellow (a triangle). I was able to find a means to make a red painting this way.
Most recently, metallic colours have come to play a role in my work because I’ve been thinking about the aluminium foil as a motif in itself. Here, like the repetition I use, I wanted to disrupt assumptions. Aluminium is a robust material; yet, it can be manufactured into a thin, delicate, and malleable sheet. When it is crumpled up, we speak of it as being ‘broken’, though it’s not broken in the conventional sense; it doesn’t have to be in bits and fragments, it can still exist as one entity. I like the duality in this. I started thinking about material qualities, so putting metallic paint adjacent to trompe l’oeil renderings of the foil made sense to me.