The Shape of Light

These paintings are drawn from fleeting moments when sunlight and shadow flood across the architecture of a room. Moments of serendipity that appear, like magic, when a shaft of sunlight falls across a wall or a familiar piece of furniture, only to disappear moments later. That flash of sunshine can lift our mood instantly and leave us happier even after it has gone.

Hazy, dreamy, and imprecise, my paintings have an ephemeral quality, where transience, impermanence and ambiguity exist. I portray my memories and experiences both viscerally and sensorially as I search for a quality that is almost impossible to pin down or categorise in my work but is a cross between abstraction and figuration.

Often inspired by specific rooms in my own home, history and memory play a part, as particular architectural details are mingled together. As abstracted fragmented shapes are brought together, these paintings become reflections on time and space.

Hermione’s multi-layered paintings are hard to define. They move in and out of the figurative, as if through a lens that sharpens or blurs, just as memory itself. But there is an ambiguity within the work which is the paradox of transience preserved.

Jackie Naffah