JAMES CLAYDEN : THOUGHT / MEMORY PAINTINGS
30.01.23 - 02.03.24
Jame clayden: artist statement
Early in 2023 after rewatching Peter Weir’s fantastic film The Last Wave I found myself once again disappointed with the way the film ended and thought to try and paint an ending for myself. The thought kept going around in my head and began merging with the memory of being in the Lisbon Aqueducts that were built on ancient Roman structures during the 18th century; this seemed together with the feeling left by the ending of the film, of being underground beneath the city but at the same time in some deep space far beyond, where past and present pulsed like some atavistic memory of longing amidst water and sky like spheres as one. Out of this, I remembered Michael Snow’s haunting 1967 short experimental film Wavelength and after watching it again it seemed something worthwhile was going on around me, without me, and this together with the mystery of painting itself is more or less how and why I began work on this series of Thought/Memory Paintings.
