Collection: Daryl Austin - Foundlore
My latest series of paintings and drawings uses imagery which has been primarily sourced from both anonymous and personal family histories, primarily through vintage, vernacular photographs found in antique stores and flea markets. These everyday images now divorced from the original familial narrative are both familiar and strange. There is a democracy of understanding and feeling, a democracy of imagery between ourselves and the hidden narrators of these images. The same tropes; an image of someone significant to another, a souvenir, a favoured place, our children, an event to be recorded, a touchstone. Though we recognise the tropes, the narratives which bind them have been lost but where narratives are curtailed, possibilities may be opened.
The original images are gradually recomposed, reconfigured and are replaced through the shifting process of painterly material transformation. A broken surface, a pixellated overlay, imagery lost and found. ghosted images, uncertainty, creating a spatial ambiguity of surface and pictorial distance where presence and absence, appearance and disappearance enforce uncanny imagery.
