The human nervous system is constantly evolving and being reshaped. We are visually bound and stimulated daily without always fully understanding the content or meaning behind what we are absorbing. Technology is often used as a medium over meaning, and is accompanied by a perpetual drive in today's society for the instant and the new.
Painting is a slow medium caught up in an ever increasing world of sophisticated visual stimuli. However, painting can provide us with a reason to pause, reflect and to find value. With painting we are required to keep coming back to the work and to take our time.
Absolute uncertainty is a starting point for each of my paintings. I use no visual source material and have no preconception of what the finished piece will be or its aesthetic. My interest is in the process, the physicality of paint and the expressivity associated with the creative act. Spontaneity, random interference, intuition and the freedom of not knowing what is to come, generate a fine balance between disorder and control, chaos and harmony.
Each work undergoes an extensive transformation from its point of departure. Paint is applied layer upon layer, scraped back, reworked and reapplied. Disassociated marks grow into association, corrections and amendments begin to reveal themselves in the painting surface; evidence of revisions and rejections that have heightened and subdued the importance of individual areas. It is this process of working that allows the form of a painting to gradually emerge until it finally becomes congruent with itself.
I use abstraction to place the viewer outside of the physical real and our everyday perception of things. The painted surface is a site of expression without a need to represent real world objects. The painting references itself as an object of contemplation open to interpretation and acts as an invitation for the viewer to make their own connection.
Darren Marsh, 2008
'We think our actions express our decisions. But in nearly all our life, willing decides nothing. We cannot wake up or fall asleep, remember or forget our dreams, summon or banish our thoughts, by deciding to do so... Our acts are end points in a long sequence of unconscious responses.' - Gray, Straw Dogs, pg. 69 (Granta 2002).