Statement:

Hilary Irons   MFA Painting 08                                           

And confronted with the photograph, as in the dream, it is the same effort, the same Sisyphean labor: to reascend, straining toward the essence, to climb back down without having seen it, and to begin all over again.

—Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

             During the course of the last two years, I have been investigating the way visual imagery can contain or deny the true substance of its origin. Nature is a primary source for me, but I have started to question the way it appears in art.  Which is closer to the source: a radiant Hudson River School landscape, picturing nature as the earthly sublime, or a William Morris wallpaper, with precisely described botanical forms wrought into pure decoration?  A map of the world?  Representations make the distance from their subject matter clear.  This tension between images and the way they carry meaning has become increasingly important to my working process, encouraging me to experiment with form in my paintings.  As my work has evolved, I use a growing range of sources and material to construct each piece. 

            The physical and performative aspects of painting have become crucial to my practice, as I experiment with methods of using paint in correspondence with variations in meaning.  Still-lifes, stripes, hard-edge shapes, and formless splashes generate different meanings from different actions. The Pines, based on a Bonnard painting, includes a still-life of branches (working from life provides a different level of mediation), but the shapes contained within the landscape express space and compression with the simplicity of geometry.  The representation of the spatial in painting is especially important for me.  In the Roadside Picnic paintings, a flat ground sets a series of geometrical planes into relief; these planes are perceived as images of greeting cards, inset with a landscape.  Looking across at the ground, out at the cards, and into the landscape, we see a set of visual modes of representation, all holding their own essential truth even while they contradict one another. Another truth about nature is contained within these pastoral landscapes.  Their sources are tourist photos of the countryside outside of Chernobyl, permanently imbued with invisible poison.  The current state of the natural world, and its potential future, is an important issue for me.   

            No one image of the world around us can contain the depth of its beauty, the damage it has sustained, the space that it encompasses, or the way it feels to be there.  In my search for forms that express conflicting truths about place, nature, and physical space, my methods extend from mimesis to gesture to the clarity of shape and pattern.