Fleur Patrick

Fleur Patrick is a contemporary painter, born in New Zealand and emigrated to the UK as a child. She graduated with a 1st class Fine Art degree before completing a Painting MA at the Royal College of Art in 2003. After living in London for many years, she now lives and works in Nottinghamshire. Her work has been exhibited globally and is included in numerous private collections. Throughout her career she has worked with and adapted found images, sourced from a wide range of mediated origins. She selects imagery which is non-specific, and yet strangely familiar to her, becoming catalysts for the uncanny. This draws on and reflects her own experiences of confused cultural identity and sense of place.

Oil paint is applied in thin, translucent glazes of colour, before it is wiped away to reveal previous layers. It is interesting how this process requires a negative act of paint removal to define the painting’s form and structure.

The work explores tensions between the painting’s image and surface, each serving to suppress the other. As a result, the clarity of the image appears to ebb and flow, materialising briefly like a trick of light, only to dissolve back into more abstract form. This precarious balance resists our attempts to fully locate, enter and navigate the space of the image, as though shrouded by a veil of uncertainty.