make believe

Themes of artifice and staging are crystallised in make believe, a series of paintings inspired by photos taken during a visit to a film set in 2021. Filming took place in an abandoned studio containing constructed sets designed to evoke place – a pottery studio in the 1920s – but also the character of the film’s real-life protagonist. Clues as to the nature of these interiors feature throughout the composition, whether in the form of a lighting rig at the edge of the canvas, or an anachronistic set of wires. The works also contain references to earlier paintings and to the studio in which they were eventually painted. As with the museum displays in Composed, the sets are both real and unreal, solid yet impermanent; cropped according to what they need to communicate and destined to be dismantled once production wraps, while living on in the narrative of a film. make believe was presented at Frestonian Gallery in London and in New York at The Armory Show.