Fleur Stevenson - Remembering running tracks

“Remembering running tracks” explores memory, personal history and place.  The sites of reference for this body of work centre around the artist’s familial spaces in New Zealand including domestic dwellings, topography of townships and surrounding ecological landscapes. Childhood experiences are drawn out from memory and paired with spoken accounts from family members as well as observations of the visible terrain to evoke a relationship between memories of ‘then’ and reflections of ‘now.’

For this body of work, canvas was cut to size according to the location of each memory and taken to New Zealand to work on at each site. Imprints and rubbings from the ground form the initial layers, establishing part of the painting’s history, where subsequent layers build the intuitive response to the site and reveal the memory as a character or landscape.

By revisiting each location and noting the observed view and emerging memory, Fleur synthesizes her interior thoughts with the exterior scape or place. This spatial relationship between interiority and exteriority is investigated through varying composition structures. In some instances, clearly visualised boundaries refer to this, as seen in works Waerenga House 1 and Garage, and in others, spaces overlap and express their alternation through changing mark and colour, demonstrated in My domain.