Painting compositions based on BRCA-1 cancer cells

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BRCA-1 Series/1

'An excessive amount of LSD can prove to be fatal in elephants'

2008 canvas | oil | mixed media | 40x40 inch | £1500

The BRCA-1 cell makes women 3-5 times more likely to develop breast or ovarian cancer. This sadly has been passed through my mothers side of my family and its been horribly devastating.

The cell's structures are strangely beautiful for something so cruel. So I decided to create a series paintings based on them. The only way I could construct the pieces was by scribbling the composition because it was so complex a design.

I started to really enjoy scribbling, I enjoyed the random composition, the shapes and the energy of the pieces. I also found the challenge of using many different materials to fill in the gaps from holographic paper, to rain forest beetles fun.

The paintings are 40x40inch multi media collages based on exploring the concept and composition of scribble. Very similar to Pollocks “daring abstract work legitimized the convergence and mastery of chance, intuition, and control generating beauty and order out of seemingly random gestures”. My interest is in the anarchic composition of scribbling and the balance of structure and colour when filling in the gaps.

The curiosity arrives from the complex cubist compositions created through an instant subconscious act. The act of scribbling has become a pure form of visual expression, an immediate, spontaneous response, an action, without thought of design or composition. Scribbling becomes an act of pure mark-making channeling, an immediate response on to the canvas.