Natalie Chapman

"Love you Mum"

My history, my present and my past: I paint portraits that engage with family identity and issues based around dysfunctional relationships and social documentary. I am influenced by the work of photographers Richard Billingham and Nan Golding, and have similarly focused on spontaneous snapshot-compositions, saturated colour space and incidental objects in order to set a scene of everyday life.

I have returned to the same old photographs of my childhood, to re-arrange my memories and work through family history and its daily struggle. I want my work to feel edgy and to seduce the viewer into contemplating ambiguous tension, a sense of emptiness, boredom and anxiety.

My process involves capturing memories using small collages of family portraits with interior scenes recalled from childhood. These studies are scaled up on large canvases to create presence and intensify personal stories using gritty expression and garish colour. I want to create images about human relationships that are simultaneously tender and dysfunctional.

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