Edith Dormandy

About

I paint things which I want to hold close and simultaneously push away: objects, images, people, but also histories, legacies of power, beliefs. I usually work directly from a physical thing or person that evokes that feeling. A successful painting is one which holds it in quiet tension – often I wait for the work to ‘float’ – hopefully producing in the final outcome, a resonant encounter across time, but one inherently restrained by the picture’s flatness.

I work in varied modes and scales, usually within the limits of rectangular paintings or drawings. This variety is important, both to do justice to the range of encounters where I experience that conflicted feeling, and to allow conflict between as well as within the works.

The painting process is itself one of tension and contradiction: it can feel like an act of violent chemical preservation as well as of tender attentiveness. It allows me to be more intensely here with my subject, but through painting it, I am putting it there: behind the picture plane. This dual function of painting simultaneously to re-embed me in the world and to hold it at bay is what keeps me coming back, and it is in the suspended place between that I hope my paintings reside.

Supported by Vice Chancellor’s Achievement Scholarship

Profile picture by Flo Lines