Eve Semple

My work is a personal exploration of the self, memory and the spaces we inhabit. Working primarily in oil and acrylic painting, I begin with personal photographs, using them as both reference and source material. Through processes of distortion and layering, I reconstruct these images to create altered narratives that shift between memory and imagination. I depict close family members, often my mother and sister, within domestic interiors that become sites of transformation. Familiar environments are disrupted by imagined forms of cosmic space and shifting fields of colour that transform the atmosphere of the scene. Moving between figuration and abstraction, I explore how perception becomes unstable and how emotional experience can reshape our understanding of space, time and identity.

These imagined environments are informed by the astrological phenomenon of Saturn Return, which I use as a framework for periods of uncertainty, reflection and transition. Rather than depicting outer space literally, I use painting to visualise interior psychological states as fluid, expansive environments shaped by memory and change. Alongside these figurative works, my practice also consists of fully abstract paintings that explore these ideas through colour, gesture and scale alone. Without figures or recognisable settings, these paintings become immersive spaces that explore sensation, perception and the instability of form. Colour shifts atmosphere and informs emotional response rather than describing reality.

Working from both archival family photographs and recent images from my iPhone, I am interested in the relationship between past and present, and how memory can be continually reconfigured through painting. Influenced by ideas surrounding perception and the emotional resonance of colour, I see painting as a space for recording and transforming lived experience, where memory and imagined environments can coexist and accumulate through process. This relates to David Joselit’s ideas about images gathering meaning through making, repetition and transforming over time. In my practice, this happens through pouring, layering, erasing and reworking the paint. Memory is not shown directly, but constructed through these processes on the surface of the painting.