Familiar
Painting, 22.8 x 30.5 cm, acrylic on wooden board
Artwork Description
This painting was not created with a specific subject in mind, yet as it developed the I began to recognise the outline of my kitchen table emerging from the composition. Rendered in dreamlike colour and softened by inaccurate shadows, the objects appear to hover rather than rest, suggesting a scene recalled rather than observed. The work captures how ordinary, domestic memories surface unbidden, reshaped by imagination into something more suspended and strange.
This piece began without a fixed subject. I started painting intuitively, without any specific object or scene in mind, and it was only partway through the process that I recognised a resemblance to my own kitchen table emerging on the canvas. The colours, shapes, and objects seemed to arrive from somewhere subconscious, rather than being planned.
I chose a dreamlike palette and used shadow to make the objects appear to float, rather than sit firmly on a surface, heightening the sense that this is a space suspended between memory and imagination. For me, this relates directly to "Future Memories": the painting demonstrates how the past does not stay fixed but resurfaces, unbidden and reshaped, through the imagination. My kitchen table is a mundane, domestic memory, yet in this work it becomes unmoored from its ordinary context and drifts into something closer to a dream. This process feels analogous to how we build the future from fragments of the past: not by replicating memory exactly, but by excavating it, distorting it, and letting it resurface in unexpected forms. The painting enacts the process by which a memory reshapes itself over time, floating free of its original context into something new.
I chose a dreamlike palette and used shadow to make the objects appear to float, rather than sit firmly on a surface, heightening the sense that this is a space suspended between memory and imagination. For me, this relates directly to "Future Memories": the painting demonstrates how the past does not stay fixed but resurfaces, unbidden and reshaped, through the imagination. My kitchen table is a mundane, domestic memory, yet in this work it becomes unmoored from its ordinary context and drifts into something closer to a dream. This process feels analogous to how we build the future from fragments of the past: not by replicating memory exactly, but by excavating it, distorting it, and letting it resurface in unexpected forms. The painting enacts the process by which a memory reshapes itself over time, floating free of its original context into something new.
Grace Lloyd
My name is Grace, I’m a Fine Art and Film student at Lancaster University. I have a passion for both my subjects and since I'm yet to settle on a preference I try to keep a clear distinction between them.
I love to travel and I find that a lot of my memories of places that I have visited shape and influence my work, whether intentionally or not. Rather than aiming for literal accuracy, I am interested in how memory, feeling and emotions make an impression upon what I create.
I love to travel and I find that a lot of my memories of places that I have visited shape and influence my work, whether intentionally or not. Rather than aiming for literal accuracy, I am interested in how memory, feeling and emotions make an impression upon what I create.