Matilda Wainwright Artist Statement Nov 2022.
My process is part phenomenology and I am guided by my experience of my materials and their materiality. I use traditional substances and methods that are imbued with connection to the history of painting: I paint with oils and ancient pigments, traditional mediums such as turpentine and beeswax and on a surface of linen or calico sized with rabbit skin glue.
I pay close attention to the sensual when I work - the sound of a pigment when ground speaks of opacity and transparency, the quickening of a hue when laid over another conjures intensity or luminosity, the laying of a hue beside another creates the energy of compatibility or conflict.
I am interested in how colour territorialises space, how form creates harmony and rhythm and how to build a satisfying painting, not a representation of something else.
However, my own visual experience: a colour or form from the rural landscape I live in, from another painting, or any other visual spark, can be a point of departure. I think a lot about the macro and micro nature of seeing, how the vast and the infinitesimally minute can look the same, fractals and the universality of visual experience and I am interested in the way we interpret our visual experience and how painting engages the senses consciously and subconsciously to achieve multiple forms of communication.
I am seeking a balance between intention and intuition, it’s like a dance, a conversation. Too much certainty deadens, too much chaos becomes unsatisfying. I want the paint to materialise the integrity of contradiction and complexity but simultaneously the synthesised beauty of simplicity.