Combined interests in psychoanalytic theory and the process of painting itself led to the series Intuit, exhibited to accompany an artist’s talk with psychoanalytic psychotherapist Sarah Wood at the freud Museum in London. Combining figurative form with impulsive abstraction, these works maintain stubborn distance from categorisation or defining feature. A tangled web of intersecting line and suggested form, I was repeatedly building up and scraping back layers to give the suggestion of form whilst maintaining a focus on the material body of the paint itself. I set out with each painting to encapsulate a moment in time, naming each piece in the series as such- sometimes time of day, others a feeling remembered. The works in this series serve to stand as visual recordings of a subconscious mind, glimpsing into the unknown and yet truly felt moments of everyday life. It was this engagement with the instinctive, the non-lingual, that provided the intent for the work itself; moments where we can maintain freedom from conscious rationalism and sink into enigmatic intuition.

Setting the works against the backdrop of Freud’s London home, I was experimenting with how context and setting influences and expands on the way the work is received. Here, I asked audiences to re-engage with an open-minded approach, experiencing the works before trying to understand them. Holding a conversation with Dr. Wood to run parallel, we discussed how it is against factual certainty that we are invited to rebel; reveling in states of in-between and contemplation.

Intuit was an attempt to use the art-form as an exposé on the unconscious and preconscious mind that dwells in us all. The consequent utilisation of the work to instigate an open-ended conversation where the only certainty, is certainty of the unknown.