Master of Fine Arts (MFA) |

Shelter in Paint: a portrait of an empty house

Lacey Jane Wilburn

See it On Campus: Level 2

West wall in the Libby Leshgold Gallery.

Shelter in Paint: a portrait of an empty house is an investigation into private space and private thought through the visual language of representational painting. These works oscillate between gesture and reality to speak about thresholds, about the doors we close between public and private life. Traditionally a portrait artist, my MFA work shifted greatly with the pandemic, and I began to explore the private sphere through domestic space, personal objects, and exterior facades as related to the psychological concept of interiority. The resulting work excavates these empty spaces for their ability to retain the presence of the human figure, atmospheres that flicker and shift between imobile spaces to present the perceptive intricacies of human habitation.

The act of painting and the materiality of the medium are as integral to my work as the spaces I am rendering. I create saturated worlds of paint that respond to the psychological intensity of the domestic world, creating parallels between space and thought through disruption, fragmentation and merging forms. Each work drives from a photograph that is first circumvented by colour, underlayers that seep up and submerge between the layers, moving into constructions that disturb and transcend the traditional confines of space to render sensations beyond the camera: atmospheres made visible, or the colour of silence. A slippage of paint between beauty and discomfort, virtuosity and impulse. Working with impasto paint, vibrating colour schematics and chiaroscuro techniques, I strive to generate moments of “stilled life;” gestures of the in-between moments that are less frequently trespassed upon in art. An immersive landscape of private space that appears organic, undulating and alive to make visible the emotional power of domestic space, the rift between public and private life, and the power of interiors to render portraits of the inhabitant.