Marianne Wilde
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Under the Skin
The examination of the ‘Suky’ portrait is an example of how a family story, that has been handed down through generations, led to the discovery of something other beneath the visually present paint on canvas.
This tale encapsulates the importance of not only what has gone before, but also how the narrative structures that emerge begin to form the identity of things. In this case a painting.
How can we ‘see’ these invisible stories? Scratching the physical surface of things literally, like the painting, and through the oral histories and present day presentations of the lives of the people and of the things, the house has become a vessel that contains a concealed geology.
My intention is to place ‘altered’ portraits amongst the current collections to disturb the existing narratives and to allow space for ‘new’ or ‘buried’ stories to emerge. These altered portraits would visualise ideas about heredity and ancestry through the layering of previously unseen cartography – such as the ‘DNA’ of both people and things.