Fleur Patrick Nottinghamshire, United Kingdom

• 
• 

  Back to profiles Invite to apply

My paintings explore architectural spaces and structures shaped by memory, displacement, invention and perception. Working in layered oil paint, I build and erode surfaces, balancing structure with chance and material behaviour. I hold an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art and have exhibited widely, including a recent museum solo exhibition at Lakeside Arts, Nottingham.

My paintings depict places derived from a range of sources and transformed through the painting process. I deliberately select places I have never physically visited, yet which carry an uncanny sense of familiarity.

Rather than representing specific locations, the work explores the experience of being between: between memory and invention, orientation and dislocation, presence and absence. The paintings resist fixed resolution, inviting viewers to dwell in ambiguity and consider how images shape—and reshape—our understanding of place.

I work in thin layers of oil paint, building, wiping, diluting and eroding the surface so that earlier marks continually re-emerge. Images develop as much through removal as through application. A drawn framework establishes spatial parameters, but remains permeable as the material properties of paint assert themselves—spreading, resisting, pooling and dissolving. The resulting image emerges through an ongoing negotiation between intention and happenstance.

The surfaces oscillate between illusionistic depth and material presence. The eye is drawn into the depicted space, then redirected by painterly interruptions back towards the surface. With sustained looking, structures begin to loosen and dissolve, reflecting the fragmented and unstable nature of perception and memory.

Underlying the work is a sensitivity to displacement and estrangement. Painting becomes a way of inhabiting uncertainty rather than resolving it.