Father, Mother, Daughter

Father, Mother, Daughter comprises three sets of artworks:
1. In situ portraits – a series of nine paintings (56x50cm)
2. Portraits – a series of nine paintings (29.5×20.5cm)
3. Woodblock prints on paper

First exhibited, 4-18 November, 2023 at General Practice, 25 Clasketgate, Lincoln, LN2 1JJ

My statement for the General Practice exhibition
The origin of these artworks is a newspaper article, which told a story of family breakdown, drunkenness and violence. The story, and its many ramifications, captured my imagination, to such an extent that I felt the need to make art about it, by creating painted and printed portraits of the newspaper story’s three main protagonists. The father, mother, daughter of the project’s title.

Each painted portrait is triple, i.e. it consists of three individual portraits of its subject. These triple portraits are not triptychs, but series, which result from the operation of adding one portrait after another to a given starting portrait image (in this case photographs from the newspaper story). Viewers of the artworks encounter the aftermath of this operation, when the series are experienced as something that forces one to think. This is the outcome of two series being put into communication by an image common to both: an electric fan, a bridge, a hand holding a knife, etc. These images can be interior or exterior to the portraits. Regardless of their location, they circulate between the series, causing a resonance in the one who views. This is the effect of being forced to think, an effect that replicates the ramifications of the original story, from which the artworks originate.

My interest in series has grown out of his engagement with the writings of the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze (1925 – 1995), who, in many of his works seeks to overturn what he considers the dominant force within painting and thinking: representation; the force that seeks to put conceptual limits on things. Representation relies on recognition in order to work, we think we know what something is when we recognise it. Series, on the other hand, create something that is unrecognisable, it is the thing that we find unrecognisable that forces us to think.

Being forced to think is a characteristic of an experiment. These artworks are experimental in two ways: my arrangement of artworks in series is an experimental approach to the demands of creating figurative art that rejects the values of representation. The second experiment is the, as yet, unknown effect that the experience of the artworks in series will have on those who view them.

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The project is theorised through the writings of the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze. In July, 2023, I gave a talk on the project at the 15th annual Deleuze Conference, held at the Institute of Philosophy and Social Theory, Belgrade, Serbia. You can read a transcript of my talk here.

Derek Hampson