(acrylic, oil stick, pencil, masking tape and collage on canvas 150cm x120cm)
The girl from my own published short story, “The Greenhouse”, finding the ruined, abandoned greenhouse, discards her clothes to let the intense rays of the sun caress her body, just as if they were the hands of the lover of her fantasy personified. Eros is everywhere, ripe-cheeked, mischievous, obscene, beautiful, in the figure of the girl, the child’s drawing of a sunflower that beams down on her, the graffiti scrawled on the walls of the greenhouse, the cobwebs, the cigarette butts, sweet wraps, chewing gum, and other debris scattered on the floor, and the implication that she is disporting herself for anyone chancing by – including the viewers in the art gallery – to see her through the grimy windows of the greenhouse and become part of the sweet, sinister world within; the fears, desires, erratic passions of puberty. Perhaps the girl longs to be found, to have the potential joy of losing herself in the wild momentum of the gang, (a member of which might have imortalised her in the filthy insinuations scrawled on the floor and walls) who might turn up at any moment, find her there, and ‘torture’ her – she wouldn’t want to dress and go home without being ‘tortured’, her lusty little body aching for something brutal to happen, some dazzling bonding ritual which would signify her total acceptance by the gang, and that her life has reality and value for then she’d truly belong, and feel fully alive.