MIRANDA SKOCZEK

Exploring themes such as memory, loss and longing, inside/outside, the domestic and self, my practice is a constant search for beauty, and an historical and symbolic palimpsest of the history of image making, and the history of my making!

From the beginning of time, humankind has displayed a penchant for embellishment, and a desire to decorate, and be nourished by their surroundings.

Travel and my engagement with different cultures heavily inform my practice, creating a dialogue between places experienced and imagined.

Sampling and remixing decorative iconography from the history of visual culture, I seek to create works of opulence and luxury. Ignoring any distance between hi and lo art, I am committed to producing work loaded with positivity, and hope to engage the viewer physically, as well as psychologically. The built up layers afford the canvasses with a sense of history, as I am constantly in a process of hiding and revealing.

Textiles, and traditional dress from around the globe , Folk art, Modernist design, architecture, Islamic motifs and Mughal miniatures, are but a few of the sources from which I borrow. Often combining graphic shapes and silhouettes in fields of colour, I explore the boundaries between abstraction and representation, design and the painterly.

Through calligraphic markings and the layering of paint, I hope to achieve cloth like surfaces, as I am often drawn to art and craft traditionally made by women.

Although my work is without narrative, I often reference the history of textiles, acknowledging certain fabrics ability to transmit information about the society in which it was produced. And how in many cultures, pattern is not purely decoration, but also a form of identification.

My work speaks of a desire to create sanctuaries for the self. It gestures towards fantasy, and a space where new meanings are actualised, and the everyday exoticised.

- Miranda Skoczek, 2009