Time passes

The drawing installation ‘Time Passes’ was commissioned by the New Art Gallery Walsall, for inclusion in the group exhibition ‘The Life of the Mind,’ curated by Bob and Roberta Smith. The exhibition focused on artists using their own life experience to generate artworks and included key works by Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, Lucia Nogueira and others. ‘Time Passes’ is a group of drawings on paper installed on five long thin black shelves. The commission followed the inclusion of my painting in a group exhibition ‘Party!’ at the New Art Gallery Walsall in 2009 and ‘Pictures From My Heart’ at Transition Gallery, London in 2010. The drawings reference the lives of three women: my grandmother, my mother and me, and include pictorial representations of real life events together with abstract drawings of motifs, patterns and text drawings. The construct of the work aims to reveal the intertwining of family lives and the psychological pathways that inform generations of a family. The placement of the drawings - in groups, with irregular spacing - and stylistic integration of text, pattern and image-making aims to defy a linear reading of the work and to break with the traditions of given narrative structures. The suggestion that in memory, time is compacted and that shared familial history informs patterns of thinking is key to the work