The Tree for my Great Grandparents
2025, 60cm x 50cm, Oil and Acrylic on Board
The Tree for my Great Grandparents was developed in dialogue with the family archive and as part of the Bryn Myrddin Residency. The painting is not an attempt to reconstruct the past, but to create the conditions through which it can re-emerge, sensed rather than explained.
I approach painting as my first language, a space in which thought is externalised and given material form. In this sense, painting allows thinking to move out of the mind and into the world, where it can pause, settle, and be observed. The work holds ideas provisionally, relieving the urgency of interpretation and allowing memory, imagination, and uncertainty to coexist without the demand for immediate resolution.
The tree operates as a genealogical structure rather than a portrait. Two lives rise from a shared root, diverging yet entwined. Tools, marks, and inscriptions are embedded within the trunk, not as fixed symbols but as mnemonic carriers of experience. They speak quietly of labour, learning, belief, and care — values transmitted through lived example rather than narrative declaration.
Time within the painting is deliberately unstable. Night presses against day; cloud drifts across gold. Historical, remembered, and imagined moments coexist, reflecting the associative logic of archival research, where fragments surface through proximity and affect rather than chronology. The image behaves less like a document than a remembered dream — precise in feeling, resistant to explanation.
Colour anchors the work in lived experience. The recurring pink interrupts the mythic register with biographical residue, preventing nostalgia or monumentality. The tools remain modest and human in scale, insisting that history is shaped through ordinary acts repeated over time.
Within the wider project of The Boy with the Monkey, this painting extends an enquiry into inheritance as an active, unfinished process. The tree does not conclude a lineage. It remains open, provisional, and growing — a structure capable of holding memory while continuing to ask questions.
