Language

Kirsten Farrell

This work is represents my questioning of painting and my love-hate relationship with it. It consists of recent paintings in nail enamel over paintings from my early career, around 2002. The main body of work from that time were paintings in house paint on transparent acrylic sheet, and their subject was women I admired at the time, my own personal cannon, their names inscribed in inscrutable alphabets of colour which, like the way I painted them, was strictly systematic. The result was a series of hard-edged abstract compositions, based on the shape of the support and the number of letters in the name of the woman. Later I also rendered texts in these private colour languages.

Over-painting with a contingent and cosmetic material like nail enamel has been a process of revisiting and questioning my early practice and its rationales as it relates to where I am now: twenty years into it and wondering why. I still have not resolved what or why these paintings are, but they are part of the process of continuing an art practice and its languages.