KATY MORAN

I am interested in artists who have rejected acquired skill or rational will in favor of something else they believe to be more authentic. I suppose the broad term for this relinquishing of agency would be automat/sm-at once a strategy with art-historical roots and an inevitable, Inextricable part of many artists' processes. I often think about the degree to which artists are willing to give away control, ranging from the incorporation of chance within very organized parameters to the extreme dissociation of outsider artists such as Madge Gill and Augustin Lesage, who credited their work entirely to spirit guides.

I make figurative paintings, yet I want to arrive at figurative imagery not by consciously representing something but by more oblique processes such as pasting fragments of painted canvas onto the work, using found objects as supports, or suggesting forms by outlining negative spaces. Francis Bacon said that he would paint certain features of his portraits in an irrational way in order to "attempt to bring the figurative thing up onto the nervous system more violently and more poignantly." For me, it is nearly impossible to know what part of the finished work comes from what part of the process. It's not as simple as picking the painting apart in the aftermath of production and deciding what was made consciously, what was made unconsciously, what came from memory, what came from external reference, and what came from goodness knows where else.

[Author Affiliation]

KATY MORAN IS AN ARTIST BASED IN LONDON.