Arwen Flowers, Journey – The last 10 years.

As I’ve moved forward with my art practice, over time I’ve had the tendency to think of completed work as not very good, wanting to put it away and finding myself uncomfortable with showing it in the public arena.

This year a good friend encouraged me by pointing out that my older artwork is good, just different to the new pieces because I keep growing and learning.

This exhibition is intended to present a creative timeline that spans a decade of my life — events including marriage, children, moving house, changing jobs and completing an artists residency have contributed to changes in my work. I have moved through investigating techniques and materials, wanting more energetic colour, added texture, greater abstraction, then less of all those and more realism instead.

Recently I’ve been developing how I work in response to wanting to connect more meaningfully with my artmaking and the finished pieces, bringing new changes again.

Through the experience of collecting my artwork together and displaying it closely in one space for this exhibition, I have become less critical of my past artistic creations, experiments, and experiences.

I can see clearly how they are all important and valuable in their own right, as they have continued to show curious traces of influence in new work, making it uniquely mine.