Twenty Six by Twenty Nine: Prudence Wilkinson

Twenty Six by Twenty Nine continues my ongoing investigation into the archive and inherited memory. This new body of work culminates and collects these new avenues of thought, this time challenging fragmentation in composition and light. At the crux of this series is a question that has recently preoccupied me; What is the relevance of painting in an age saturated with digital imagery? Photographic archives and collective memories have jumped inside of a flat beaming surface, rendering them intangible, ephemeral, and unreliable. In response, my painting practice has become a way of reclaiming tactility. A process of reinterpreting and materialising found archives through the slower, more embodied act of painting. 

The gesture of painting for me is both intimate and investigative. I’m drawn to the ambiguous quality of found familial photographs. The lack of visual clarity motivates me to reinterpret and insert my own subjectivity, similar to memory. I’m particularly interested in how found photographs operate as vessels for memory, not just of people I knew, but also of people I knew of. I intend for my paintings to occupy a space between a personal and collective memory.

The motivation to produce a larger body of work was in part an effort to confront doubt and to push the work towards a threshold where repetition might risk becoming mechanical. Paradoxically, I was compelled by this unknown. I was curious of what would happen to the work if I surrendered to a rigorous, almost industrial pace. I’m wondering whether this repetition has the ability to transcend doubt, or if it would completely absorb it.

The resulting works echo the visual language of the photographic albums I draw from. Juxtaposing moments of intimacy and spectre, children in costume sit alongside formal banquet scenes and black-and-white images of trade in 1940s Libya. My paintings of these photographs are deliberately cropped and blurred, emphasising a sense of anonymity and the partiality of historical memory. Faces are obscured and narratives inside of the archives remain elusive. Like memory, left with traces, not truths.

Through these paintings, I continue to explore the space where memory falters. Where the image resists clarity, and where the act of painting reasserts itself, not by replicating the past, but by unsettling it.