Fleur Yearsley
The subject matter of my paintings are the fruit of personal memories, often imbued with a sense of shared cultural imagery. The symbols and objects of my work become a focal point for broad collective experiences instilled with a sense of mortality, they are captured moments of our past life, memories of what makes us who we are.
Inspired by personal experience, I capture fragments of lives moving through private and shared spaces. From childhood to adulthood, the hermetic bubble of the modern home to the city, parks and dance floors, my visual language sings a generational anthem. I imagine snapshots of scenes after an action has taken place, transforming these views into monumental paintings. Play is the life force running through my paintings, with a humorous approach to the sweet and sour.
I structurally consider and refine the paintings with colorful sensibility usually on large canvas, allowing for a sense of immersion and for the object depicted to take center stage and become a model in its own right. This blown-up scale of painting is comparable to looking through a microscope, finding details and viewpoints that may have been missed at first glance. The extensive size also intensifies the seemingly everyday subject matter I explore and creates an unusual tension by vividly staging the commonplace objects that I paint. The freshness in their immediacy, the paintings appear big and bold, but at the same time sensitive.
At a time of social and political polarisation, I attempt to find commonalities with others by discovering shared memories through painting. What at first appear to be ordinary objects serve as metaphors and devices to explore intimate relationships, emotional connections and humanity through the materiality of paint.