ATMOSPHERES: 2024 Solo Commission

“In my studio, there is a large table with a pile of ill-printed photographs; they have been drawn on, ripped up, some photocopied into black and white and drawn on again. There are plenty more in boxes; these are chosen. For the intimate mass of grasses I recall being nestled in, others for a particular memory I can’t quite place, an intensity of light or a specific colour, soft duck egg blue, or rich purply greys. They aren’t in chronological or geographical order. Sure, they are of places I’ve spent time in, mostly alone; they are embedded with memory and reverie, but now, in my studio, these images reworked, re-felt, and reimagined into collages become something else. A portal into an imagined realm. Holding these little worlds in my hand, they seem tantalisingly graspable. They are an object, a representation. Even ripped up and drawn on, a photograph purports to be fact. That’s its offer of surety. And yet, they are also a passage through reality, time, and emotion. They offer me both clarity and an enigma. And so, I paint to elucidate a certain feeling or atmosphere. And that is how I see these paintings – as a collection of atmospheres. More precisely, they are about the slow transition from one moment to the next. One colour into another. The space between becoming and dissolving, intimacy and distance, presence and absence, harmony and discord.” – Michaye Boulter, 2024.