BATEAU-LAVOIR

In 2022 I undertook a painting residency in the recently flood affected town of Lismore, in Australia's northern New South Wales. The ground floor studio I inhabited had, only a few months prior, been completely submerged with water. Walking around Lismore I witnessed the devastation wrought by this massive event - houses floated away or collapsed, so many derelict and abandoned, rich life now hollowed out. As the series of paintings evolved, I noticed how structural forms had that entered the pictorial space from one side began to cross over bridging both sides. A sweeping horizontal movement. The name Bateau-lavoir translates as wash-house. An apt name for paintings made in a once submerged studio, and a nod to the studio nicknamed so, wherein Braque and Picasso developed a methodology of painting less corralled by assumed pictorial rules.