Interiors

Interior — My Bedroom. Revers-painted acrylic on Perspex. 300×210mm. 2025.

For Other People's Parties at Quiet Dog Gallery, Whakatū Nelson, I made three self-portraits — reverse-painted in acrylic on Perspex. Two measure 300 × 210 mm; the third is slightly larger, at 300 × 400 mm.

Reverse painting is a process of working backwards. Each layer is applied in reverse order to the back of the surface. What you paint first is what you see last. Once the painting is complete, the image is sealed and fixed in place.

The series began with collages torn from interiors and fashion magazines — compositions that turned out to be about returning to Ōtautahi Christchurch after fifteen years in Whakatū Nelson.

All three works share the same first word: Interior.

I have been reading Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. In the chapter on the married woman, she takes up Gaston Bachelard's idea of the home as a counter-universe — a world set in opposition to the world. Reality is concentrated inside the house, while outer space seems to collapse.

A complete world, set against a dissolving one. Which is, I think, what I have been painting without saying: the inner rooms, where memory and imagination meet, and where the outside is something that happens to the windows.