Cherry Pickles

Artist statement

I make images with paint, collage, drawing and camera. Work is from observation, directly from life, from drawings, from photographs, from screen images. Self-portraiture is central, partly because I'm simply the observable human figure in what I paint but also, through performance, it allows me to trespass into the worlds of other women and, more particularly, men. Different realities can be combined in contemporary and subversive response to myth or bible story. My windscreen paintings are a response to landscape imperfectly perceived beyond the familiar cluttered foreground, smeared windscreen, and the indistinct self-portraiture of the rear-view mirror. I am fascinated that I can use drawing to respond democratically (denying hierarchy to contrasting subject matters) to the media's indiscriminate treatment of conflict, death, celebrity, pornography, triviality but, when such a topic touches me personally, it is important to me to see how this illusion of objectivity breaks down.

I like the way the varied size, shape, materials and styles of the works carry an autobiographical narrative reflecting how my life is lived through my work. The huge unstretched works are a consequence of having had the chance to work in open air Caribbean studios using travel-friendly acrylics. The larger oil paintings are evidence of time spent working and re-working in the studio.

Landscape format windscreen paintings show time spent working behind the wheel in car parks and laybys. Drawings of roadscapes, seated passengers, aeroplane food and wing-tips is time spent on the move. Other work that also uses line, very limited colour and sometimes fragments of text is a consequence of time spent in front of screens or in cafes, skimming through and drawing from well-thumbed newspapers and magazines.