Kop
Kop is a work comprising eighteen paintings of the same head. The head is looking back, the head is looking away. It contains degrees of voyeurism - in a way we are implicated in looking at the back of this head. The head is not covered in hair or a hat - it is bare, and vulnerable. It becomes this space where one‘s negotiating something unspoken - this bare head from behind is inviting a particular kind of looking, where we can stare and look again and again. But there is the potential that at any moment this person might turn around. Therefore there is also something around awareness that comes into play around these heads. The kind of awareness involved in sensing someone behind you - that feeling of presence, like when you're across the road and feel a pair of eyes on you. The stare onto the back of this head is quite a loaded moment, that taking in of someone, that being mesmerised by someone, trying to sum them up, or know what they’re thinking. So there is this psychological component to the work which is assumed by the viewer looking at the heads. All eighteen paintings were painted individually in one pass. The idea was not to have to decide on a new image to paint for each painting, but rather concentrate on and practice the actual process of mark making and layering on the material. So presenting all eighteen paintings at once also serves as a generous act of showing an unvarnished glimpse into making paintings through repeated efforts, showing both failed paintings, and paintings that work better than others. The eye naturally moves across all paintings, and tries to compare and find differences between them, so they invite a different kind of looking - a looking more concerned with drawing, and colour, and brushwork, and tone - the parts that make up a painting.
