by curator Fenne van den Heuvel
October 2019
Nancy mostly sketches while she is travelling with her children. She draws from the figure and from the world she is surrounded by. Using inspiration from moments, journeys, transitions and memories she translates gestures and experiences into paint, guided by her emotional response to the feeling of the moment rather than the representational narrative.
A question that has occupied her throughout the past year is: ‘in the removal of representation in favour of the emotional response, does the narrative still remain? ‘ Curious about intuition, time, and the consequential act of painting, she attempts to capture time, reflecting on how each brush stroke has a response.
Attempting to always paint intuitively, by unthinking, and by painting to reach her own personal truth rather than that of the audience, Nancy believes that, just as we give secrets away through our body language, pictures made by our hand hold even more of our personal stories, responses, memories and beliefs. In this new body of work, she has been researching and exploring different starting points for abstraction including mark making, use of colour, cropping, masking, obscuring and also chance.
Starting with an intention and then waiting for the next impulse, Nancy’s work develops organically and from the heart.
In this body of work, the artist has explored and researched different starting point for abstraction including The opposing totems on show today tell of the artist’s personal development over the past year and hints at her growing potential. Knowing when to stop is part of what has challenged her practice over the past year, and as such, you will find that the paint is still wet.
