The paintings in this exhibition are inspired by the locations sourced for my photographic and film work.
In preparation I explore a specific area to find relevant backdrops for musicians portraits and album covers. I take photographs as reference using a variety of cameras, both digital and analogue, exposing new and old film stock.

Settings range from urban to rural and coastal landscapes, as well as extraordinary architectural interiors. These scenes contain an alternative narrative to the one I will later allow the musicians to impose on.
My interest is in how we individually relate to our surroundings, and the narratives we weave into them. Many of these locations are ephemeral, disappearing within days, in the ever-changing skyline. I am intrigued by the captured moment, and the impermanence. Graffiti is painted over, hoardings come and go. They exist only in the photographs, and paintings.

Once processed, the resulting photographs develop their own dialectic. Some images spark memories and provide the inspiration for further exploration. Random passers by, captured by chance in the location reference shots, are a significant part of the new narrative and are included in the painting. The characters in these improvised scenarios appear anonymous, genderless strangers who resonate with my search for a place in the world, and sense of ‘self’. They become entangled in the yarn and are repeated, often myriad times, suggesting all possible permutations and outcomes – the “what ifs” of paths that may or may not be trodden.

The new narrative develops like a storyboard. Overlaying negatives, painting further detail, collaging in text, music score, lyrics, contour lines from a map with layers of abstract textures and symbols.
Some details may be temporary – a piece of graffiti, a painted hoarding, or an eroded coastline. It is these chance presences, however, that combine to create the contingencies of the work, shared on paper or canvas, offering a multitude of dramatic narratives within a single image, inviting the viewer to contemplate and revisit their own memories and dreams.

I stretch the works after painting them. They often continue beyond the frame, turning round the corners of the wood, disappearing beyond the line of vision…. a perpetuation. The works are not framed, because the story continues even after the narrator ceases to narrate.

Titles are from words and phrases that occupy my mind while painting, occasionally taken from song lyrics, literature, found text, or from the locations themselves, such as On Great Eastern Street, where I photographed Billy Bragg, Titles encapsulate the new narrative that comes from the repetition and layering of possibility.
… And again … memories with no words … again and again’ resulted from immersion in relevant childhood memories that arose from children running

through the railway arches in a location image.

It was written, I should be loyal to the nightmares of my choice, from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness came at a time when I was having intense and vivid nightmares, over important decisions and which path to take.

En Estos Momentos emerged from location shots taken in Cuba, while shooting Eliades Ochoa and Buena Vista Social Club in Havanna, and Santiago de Cuba. The text from a Cuban magazine featuring Che Guevarra and Fidel Castro from the time of the revolution carried the words En Estos Momentos resonated…. As relevant to the current political upheaval world wide.

In a grey area of incomplete diagnosis refers to recurring anxiety allergies from causes unknown, but exacerbated by personal fears, and losses, the environmental crisis, and sensibility to world chaos .

Tongue-tied I am bound

To weave my words with thistledown

Sickle moon on the moor

Turns thistledown silver and fingers rawi 1 Lyrics from Tongue-Tied by Emily Portman

JB has developed a unique visual language across an extensive portfolio. Her background in film and photography plays a significant role in her mixed media images. By intensifying the particularities of light and graphic elements they are reminiscent of movie stills or dreamlike scenes, while resonating with the political and personal narratives of our time. By overlapping negatives worked over with gouache, oils, abstract mono-printed textures and text elements she unravels a relevance and emotional intent of a particular location.

The resulting images are not limited to the confinements of the large stretched canvasses, but suggest a world outside the boundaries. The multitude of layers and textures, repetitive patterns and composition of figurative and abstract elements, the setting of sepia colour schemes against black and white, all add to a sense of age and agelessness. Impressions of nostalgia are further enhanced by the presence of the small lone figures seemingly lost in these vast surreal landscapes. Burrows – along with her anonymous figures – becomes a part of the image: “And that’s something you can’t do on a screen,” she says. “You’re removed from the image when you’re working on a computer.” Hers is a process of perpetual distillation. As she scouts for her filmic and photographic locations, she zooms in, freeze-frames that transient moment, and then zooms in further, taking a still smaller frame, from which to build up a new narrative, under close scrutiny. She describes a feeling of seeing beyond: through the lens, along the alleyway, and through the arches.

Farewell, Finisterre Sleep away the afternoon Just rocking with the tide

Drinking with the moonii
1 Lyrics from Finisterre by Ian Telfer, © Complete Music 1990, from the album Ashore by June Tabor (Topic

Records 2011), for which Judith Burrows shot the artwork

ç

“Make yourself one with dust.

This is the profound identity. The eternal profundity

between man and nature….. of ash and the earth from which

we come and from which we return” Antonio Tapies from Tao te Ching

Ideas may begin as photographs, or oil paintings on canvas, screen-prints, lithography or etching, then develop across metal, glass sculptures, film, sound. I choose materials that decay and atrophy with time, in turn becoming absorbed back into the earth, acknowledging impermanence : steel, glass, degradable papers and canvas.

At a point of vulnerability what is revealed are rich tones and form decided by nature in the printed outlines of the source material fragility on the surface in metamorphosis;
a palimpsest holding memory in process:
a rebirth.