Laura Jamieson

Artist Statement

My work is primarily concerned with investigating notions of nostalgia and souvenirs, reconstructed memories and our relationship to moments of history. I am interested in why and how we construct our own private worlds, evoking a sense of the 'other', and meditations on things that have passed. I work across a range of media, most recently through paintings where I assemble glimpsed and fleeting memories, composing colour saturated images that include moments of exacting detail contrasted by areas of vague lost corners. I take source material from old postcards, holiday photographs and shared stories to construct fictional my environments. Memories used do not necessarily have to be mine, or even one single memory, but my paintings come from carefully curating a collection of images. The collected elements of my paintings create a new identity in much the same way as we give to the half recalled memories of the past. I repaint my canvases repeatedly, creating histories of narratives which sometimes see my paintings changing form in their entirety. The process of applying paint to the canvas is critical in creating the image, the composition develops over time, with arrangements of elements changing until I feel they are in harmony with each other. An element of pattern within the marks and lines I make also occurs to help create the balance that I am seeking.