Tracey Keeping

3 September - 8 October

Opeing 7:30pm Firday 2 September

Artists Statement

My work is informed by that slippery thing called hindsight. By its very nature a shifting mutable kind of knowledge that reflects the other theme of the paintings childhood. The starting points are generally family photographs with which I am usually very familiar and the children within them whose childhoods are long gone or about to be over.

Through the paintings I become increasingly distant from the subjects and inevitably perhaps I have found I am less interested in the particular and more in exploring the space between that frozen recorded moment and the time in between that and the present.

I am influenced by the Eastern European illustrators that I loved as a child, the theatrical nature of them and perhaps my own background in the music industry. I was an avid reader of all those ubiquitous Edwardian and Victorian childrens’ stories and characters and they slide in there too. My convent education takes a bow in there and I hope this lends a certain ambiguity, atmosphere and a sense of the interior nature of the subjects and the implied life ahead of them.

CV

I was always hugely interested in art as a child and studied it at school. As as an adult I studied illustration and art practised informally at the City Lit Institute in London along with life drawing classes. I was asked to do a solo exhibition at The Oxford Museum Art Gallery around Theme of Alice in Wonderland in 2017 and I took part in a solo curated show at my local festival in Wirksworth in 2018, was a prize winner at The Open Harley Gallery in 2019 and an exhibitor most recently at The Discerning Eye London in 2020 and 2021.