The Hungry Ghosts
The series of paintings on cardboard, The Hungry Ghosts, respond to contemporary magazine ‘lifestyle’ images. Painted in a direct way, deliberately undermining the cult of the good painting, painted on an abandoned and abject material, they respond to our own culture’s hunger and excess, of which our desire for the perfect moment and the perfect lover form part. They are paintings in which being seen to live the dream has become the dream.
The realm of the Hungry Ghosts is one of the six realms of existence in Tibetan Buddhist cosmology. The Ghosts have huge hungry stomachs and thirsty mouths, but necks that are too thin to swallow. They can never be sated.
…In this show, I draw on two ideas – the Hungry Ghosts and the Lost Object (from Kleinian psychoanalysis). Both acknowledge and try to describe a sense of loss which drives us in acquisitiveness, addiction, deception, busyness and creativity. I see my own obsessive production of images as an attempt to restore my own Lost Object or feed my Hungry Ghost self.
EM 2012