Background Noise

Michelle’s new work explores memory and landscape through painting. The East Anglian landscape of her childhood and home to her ancestors is the starting point for many of her painting projects. This current body of work is more figurative than earlier paintings. Michelle has evolved this change to create a more readable narrative. The new work draws upon memories of growing up during the Cold War near a large US military airbase in Suffolk which housed nuclear weapons and flew fighter jets overhead several times a day.

With the imminent return of US nuclear weapons to this base, and the continuation of deafening planes flying overhead, Michelle felt compelled to make work about this from the perspective of both the naive, oblivious child resident that she was and the now informed anti-war adult visitor of family still living in the village.

The disconnected relationship between placid village life and a foreign war machine, whereby the obvious goes unsaid and the visible unacknowledged is her starting point. Her visual language has a child-like element to it to signify the child’s viewpoint of playing near the fence of the airbase. Motifs of planes, fences, and playgrounds are depicted and set within swathes of colour which links bank to previous abstracted landscapes.