Artist Statement
Boulton’s practice explores ideas around memory and time, whilst expressively reinterpreting the genre of floral still life painting. She references and combines the traditions of Still Life painting and Abstraction within her mix of vigorous and delicate marks.
The Still life genre reminds us of the transience of life and the fragility of nature. Her cut bouquets reflect mans manipulation of nature and hint at its consequences. Historically floral still life painting has been seen as slight and feminine, however, Boulton is not interested in her paintings being gendered, her flowers have strength and muscle, they are untethered with backgrounds void of reference. She sees them as living organisms in a state of becoming, in their own orbits.
To start her process, Boulton works directly onto the canvas recalling memories of a specific historical floral painting. The artists guiding her work are many. Edouard Manet (1832-1883), Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904) and Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) recur alongside Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750), Mary Moser (1744-1819), Winifred Nicholson (1893-1981) and Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012), to name but a few.
Building from the instability of memory as opposed to directly referencing the historical work, her desire to respond to the original memory is eventually abandoned as references flow from one artist to the next, intuition and spontaneity take over, past and present collide and the work writes its own narrative in layers of paint. The finished paintings retain a feel of the original source in an oblique way, gently nudging association and hovering between abstraction and figuration.
Click here to listen to Miranda’s Podcast Interview: ‘A Geography of Colour’.
Studio Interview - 'Ghosts and Flowers', October 24