Peregrination - An Artistic Journey

My art and research practice often involve how memory functions and how we store and recall memories of our past. Memory plays an essential part in how individuals and groups construct their identities, imagine ideas, images, and feelings. Memory is often more than just a record of an experience. It can also be an engaging account of a peregrination through hamlets, ghost towns, cities, and villages.

The paintings, in my current series Peregrination, record the physical, imagined, experienced, and remembered ideas of my journey while walking 800 kilometers along the Camino de Santiago. A Peregrination is a journey or pilgrimage, especially a long or meandering one, where one travels or wanders around especially on foot from place to place. On the journey to Santiago de Compostela, pilgrims traditionally carry a rock with them from the start of their journey, before leaving the rock at Cruz de Ferro, also known as the Stone of Burden representing all that you want to leave behind.

In my current work, I am exploring the concept of peregrination through painting, a medium which, by the act of mark making on a surface, combines subject matter with physicality. I strive to capture the memory of walking to Santiago where textural stimuli such as rocks, gravel, grass, dirt, and pavement are felt beneath my feet. These are the memories that are absorbed into the layered structure of my artistic practice. I begin my work by building up the surface of a painting with strips of old canvas, papers, and found objects. I often bury the work in the earth allowing nature to impose decay upon the process. I then peel back individual layers through physical deconstruction by sanding, carving, and detaching. The surfaces of the paintings are layered and manipulated representing my peregrination of the obscured boundary between creation and the potential for destruction.