Maud Wheldon-Posner

I approach painting as a place to explore how different arrangements might incubate tension or suspense. The canvas becomes a heterogeneous model; combining observation, improvisation, and memory, my work seeks to allow – even demand – perpetual change and mutation and invite repeated contemplation about types of looking. Growing up in a turbulent family home, monitoring, reality and unreality, restriction, surveillance, control and invasion are familiar themes in my life. I combine my own autobiographical elements with an amalgamation of screenshots from instagram, news items and film and find myself mostly drawn to images where I am intruding on a moment where something is about to happen, an act implied but not entirely illustrated, disturbing a safety and comfort in viewing.

Rather than using stereotypical image of trauma to testify to these ideas, I attempt to create a space of heightened contrast in order to destabilise the viewing experience. I employ Brechtian theatrical devices to create a level of distance between viewer and painting, often employing interesting perspectival devices and fragmented figuration to restrict the view. Through a process of redacting, obliterating, concealing, distorting and then revealing what lies underneath, I am often met with surprise and seek to reach the moment where I, too, become wrong-footed upon entering the paintings.

Balancing brashness and delicacy, flatness and depth on the same plane, I nod to the painting as constructed fiction, raising issues of  believability and verisimilitude granted by the surrender to fantasy. One moment interrupts the entire canvas, creating an activation in stillness. The product of multiple acts of insertion, deletion, and transformation create conflicting languages of mark making. These often appear playful, yet the exploitation of shadow acts as a device to create a sense of threat,  but it remains important that where this lies is unidentifiable, turning the familiarity against itself.