Keith Malone

Statement

My work explores the instability of memory, place, and identity. I seek out and reshape my own memories in order to reconstruct them as fragmented and blurred realities which are open to shifting
narratives. I use oil paint, charcoal, pastel and layered materials and explore the relationship between myself and my identity through environments and objects, visiting places and examining objects that were significant to me at one time through the lens of my present self. I then respond to my experience of having reshaped, investigated and revisited them. I liken my working process to that of someone searching the attic of an old house or exploring a junkyard. Each of my paintings act as a site of reflection for particular parts of my life kept in one place, behaving like altars to the past as well as reflections on how time transforms my experience of self.

Introductory Text

I think about the letter my aunt gave me for my birthday and in old fashioned tradition had written ‘SWALK (Sealed With A Loving Kiss)’ on the back of the envelope and wondered about why that made me feel a certain way.

I pay attention to the people around me and the environments I find myself in.
I think there has been a deeper investigation into this feeling I’m having and a closer look from an emotional point of view rather than a critical one, I ask more questions about where these feelings go, ask why more often, and have built a practice on unravelling and restitching my understanding of myself.

Ultimately, it’s about vulnerability, and protecting vulnerability by sending it away to storage. I work to understand the absurdity of supposedly ordinary things and the wish to escape from them to places
where the very thing you run from sits to greet you.
I think much of contemporary art is doing something traditional by non-traditional means. So, you make a painting as though you were making your dinner, you make a video as though you were making
a sculpture or vice versa, you make a performance as though you were commuting to work. Things like that, and ultimately the “now” is about a restructuring of ones understanding of history and the self rather
than an assumed sense of progress, it’s about finding a balance that allows for more intimate narratives to exist and be seen as well as making work that reveals the basics of being human. I don’t try to create a feeling in my work, I feel something, then work.

Up until now my work has been about memory, ones that were false or ones that have changed. Now it’s about my own active participation in life and my concerns toward my personhood, as well as the conditions by which myself and those I love are required to live.