When the full-scale war in Ukraine started, it affected me so much that I couldn’t keep making the work I had been making. On the day that Russia invaded Ukraine I made a painting on paper from one of the news photos of the first rocket strike on an apartment block. That led on to a series of figurative paintings with a variety of subjects, including my own body, satirical paintings of Sergei Lavrov, herons, nonconformist chapels, and Romanian folk masks. For some reason, I just felt compelled to sniff around at various motifs that interested me, as if trying to find metaphors for what I was feeling. The war jerked something out of me, but I didn’t know how to respond.
Some months later I came back to the war. I made a series of cardboard stencils from news photos of the war, abstracting the photos to the point where they were often just pieces of jagged horizon, or the outlines of figures. Images full of detail and pathos became shrouded and ambiguous. Tracing round the stencils, I made a series of small silhouette paintings, some in acrylic on board and others in acrylic or rabbit skin glue on unprimed canvas. Some of them used unusual materials as pigments, such as aluminium oxide abrasive powder, tea leaves, pollen and metal powders. Some had threads and embroidered elements added.
I have titled the series ‘Ellipses’, because I saw the war as a rupture, absence or discontinuity, like something had dropped out of the world. There was a sense of disbelief, as of something out of its correct place in time, when the war started. It had felt to me for some time as if we were living again in the 1930s, in the lead up to some terrible conflict, of the sort we associate with the past, not the present. War suspends and there is something unsayable about war. At the same time, war is exhaustively documented, in grainy drone footage and pin-sharp images by professional war photographers. Endless images and endless overwhelming detail. When it comes to actually mourning war, and not just documenting it, you come to what can’t be said or shown. I wanted the series to be about the sadness I felt.
An ellipsis marks something that’s missing, or a trailing off, or something that is understood but not necessary to say. All of these are relevant to the feeling I want to express. An ellipsis has an end and a hope – there is more beyond the absence. In mourning, a lot is left understood but not said. There is an enormity that even the sheer mass of photographs and videos cannot begin to grapple with and the only way that I can think of to grapple with it is to say less rather than more, to focus on the feeling and the absence. A kind of unsaying or trailing off of speech.
Several paintings from the series were exhibited at Nomas* Projects, Dundee, in November 2023 in an exhibition titled Ellipsis: a lament for Ukraine.
See the Ellipsis Series page on my website for more images of the series.
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