-Still Lifes- by mixed media artist Jenny Grevatte

I started out as a painter of still life. It's a first love. I see it as being my playground almost. I can experiment and drive new ideas forward. I'm in control of the shapes. I'm in control of the colours. What I'm not in control of, and that's deliberate, is the surfaces that I create. I love those to be random. And then I impose my compositional ideas on the random surface. And this recent group, they came about by accident. I was looking at some old work that I'd chopped up in the hope that I might be able to reuse the boards. I can twist and turn the board around and start to see my familiar objects within it. And that's how some of these began. I had hoped to be taken to Egypt, because I've always wanted to go and see the temples and the treasures. But we never got there because it's not the most peaceful part of the world. So I took myself off to the British Museum instead and had a few days in the department of Egyptology. And I became very inspired and I thought, well, how can I use this Egyptian iconography, ideas, these flat patterns, how can I reinterpret those? And I started placing these imaginary objects on imaginary shelves and playing with the positive and negative shapes. Again, reusing surfaces or recreating surfaces and then simplifying them by putting the negative shape of the background in and releasing these found objects from the background.