‘Refraction painting’, is a term I use to describe the colour based works, that use semi-transparent acrylic in the face. This acrylic screen scatters the light waves and creates a refraction event in real-time. Colour and form, are the vehicle to express the behaviour of light within the frame and draw your attention to the optical effects of the material.
It has been an interest of mine to question and subvert ‘painting’, as a formal tradition. In many ways, these works are sculptures, in the guise of painting. Since it is in the square, or rectangular form, and hangs on the wall, we read the works as paintings, and they are certainly informed by a painting practice.
Is it a painting, if we can’t see the paint? We perceive its colour and luminosity, yet the texture, mark, and surface-based concerns can not be examined with any scrutiny. Eliminating one element like this allows another, to become more pronounced. So colour appears to be the focus of the work, although, in my mind, it has always been a secondary support system, for the light refraction, which occurs with this specific framing method.
In my Sydney exhibition of 2021, ‘Deliquescent light’ I installed two digitally printed works as an experiment. These digital works were produced using a Dye Sublimation process on aluminium. The idea was, to see if people noticed the difference in any way. I asked people to see if they could uncover the works, which were not painted, visually there was no discernible difference, and it became clear that the romance around painting the piece by hand, was irrelevant to the function of these works as sculptural pieces, that build upon the concerns of ‘light and space’.
Some of the pieces I am making are using polymers, others digital methods of production, some are more in line with the ‘readymade’ approach, and use the colour properties of the material itself to express the frame.