With Friends Like These...

One Saturday in January 2009 Andy, Dee, and a woman, who's name I can't remember helped me move into a new studio at Waygood on Shields Road. I'm hoping that before I finish writing this her name will come back to me.

And in a way that is what these paintings are about. The way that trying to remember something is like peeling an onion. Stripping back the layers of flesh until you find what you are looking for. How far back can I go? What am I looking for? Will it be ok when I find it?

The series Talk To Me began with remembered images of myself as a girl kicking a football: in a field near a fence; beside a London Double-Decker Bus; on a beach with a stripy beach umbrella. In the time, since January, that I have been painting them, these images have given way to two distinct and body-less faces. Each face inhabits a vastly different place. One a cloud-like form and the other a patch of ill-defined paint. The fact that they occupy the same universe, or canvas, is all they have in common. They are so different that they are unable to communicate. They appear to be talking, but infact their differences are so acute that they have learnt to exist side by side, but without any interaction. They exist in an atmosphere of conflict and non-communication.

I know what images or history lie beneath this conflict, and so do a few friends who visited my studio while I was making them, but you don't. And you don't need to. It isn't necessary.

Nope, I still can't remember her name. She was very nice though. I hope she's ok. She seemed quite sad.

Helen Smith 2009