Artist Statement

Willett’s abstract pieces are immersive and hypnotic sensory environments – transporting the viewer to an aesthetic world of rhythm and illusion – always inventive, challenging and beautiful

Painting, for me, is a way of balancing stillness with energy and movement. 

One of the things I find most compelling about painting is the slowing down of time, and how this temporal register can effect the work.    The process I have developed consists of both systematic repetition and conscious intuition, creating detailed, multi-layered surfaces – the outcome never fully predicted.    Repetition of form, as in the natural environment, creates complex growth patterns and rhythms, allowing the pictorial space to act as a platform for transformation and evolution.    The layers create visual tensions and a dialogue emerges between what is hidden and what is revealed.  The results can play with the stability of the viewing experience, creating complex illusions of depth and movement that confuse the eye and trick the brain.

There is a desire through the labour intensity of the work for the monumental and prosaic to co-exist and for the results to act as a visual map of the temporal activity.   The paintings sometimes have a playful element, hovering between abstract and representational,  elevating the mundane to a heightened status.

The interconnectedness of everything we do and all the encounters we have, has never been more important.  I believe that everything we experience visually or sensually will remain within us, sometimes finding its way back from the subconscious to the conscious. So, influences could range from the quotidian – a piece of frayed lace, textiles, the soapy puddles from a car wash, to awe inspiring images from the Hubble telescope or from the deep-sea world.

 

 

 

 

 

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