Dr Sally Payen MA (RCA) PhD, co-founded Salt Road in 2005. Link to artist site.
Statement
I am a modernist painter who uses symbols and forms to explore the human condition in relationship to memory, activism, gender and our entanglement with non-human worlds.
Recently I have been sitting with a particular strand of earth research – Suzanne Simard’s work, author of ‘Finding the Mother Tree’; I like that she is part of the army of scientists who bear witness, research and report back to us if we have the ears to listen and that the scientists seem like care workers of the earth. What I am aiming to do is carefully merge the frame of the scientist; that is my poetic interface with the area with a ‘monolithic everywoman’ vibe. Mixing things up like cosmophilia which is connecting macro and micro views of things in the world and how they seem visually close. All of this is influenced by my meditation and qigong practice – an aspect of which is all about how we are the nature we investigate, less about separation, more about standing on the earth with our heads in the galaxy.
The painting is a place, a stage for me to touch these various subjects and find a kind of visual alchemy. I keep going till I find it, that something that feels illusive, it goes on endlessly year after year, painting to painting, it’s not really about words. Whatever subject I am exploring there is the day to day-ness that runs through everything. There is my modernist background and training; that there is always this still flat light and paint that gets moved around.
Matt Price ‘Melos is both curious and cryptic and stems from Payen’s interpretation of philosopher and theorist Jean-Francois Leotard’s use of the word melos to describe an aesthetic, poetic, musical – almost religious – experience in the stages before a story has been told and before we can reflect on it’s meanings… For the artist, the process of painting conveys a deep and emotional power that can be felt or understood before knowing or recounting ‘the story’ (of Greenham Common). Just as a piece of music without words can capture and convey a profound mood, a moving emotional register, so too can paint’. From the publication and exhibition ‘The Fence and the Shadow’, 2017, MAC Birmingham.