2012 KILL/JOY

I have always wanted to paint a large scale mural. At the beginning of my
career, I made some of my first good money creating artworks on the walls
and facades of boutiques and bars but noone has yet offered me the wall
space, public or private, on which to conceive a very large work without
constrictive provisos about what I could paint.

A few years ago, I tried to get around this by creating a series of large high-
gloss enamel paintings on large timber boards. Dangerous Career Babes was
conceived as an 'installation'. Each Babe was exactly the same size (on a
1.60m x 2.10m background), in exactly the same pose, but in different
'costumes' and colours (just like a Barbie Doll). When hung very close
together in a large institutional or corporate space they were intended to
overwhelm the viewer and to force them to confront how they viewed these
emphatically feminist yet feminine images.

Now I am intent on realising an even larger-scale mural. Kill/Joy references,
in part, the stark simplistic stencils of street art as well as the media-inflected
themes of kinky sex and violence that persist across my oeuvre. I want each
of the nine images (and their words, which are just the slightest tug of the
forelock to Magritte) quite literally to overshadow the observer's view of them
as discernible 'objects' – to blind them, as it were, to the bloody obvious.