Original painting title: Sussex Pond/Dew Pond Frame size 60 x 85 cm
Victoria Albuquerque 1969
Sussex Pond / Dew Pond
2021
Oil painted on stretched linen
Framed with wood painted off black
60 x 85 cm
The Identity Series
Starting in the summer of 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, I noticed I was wearing many different hats. Maybe it was the isolation, but I became so much more aware than I had been before of the different and distinct identities through which I was living. And then I saw that this was something that all of us do, whether as mum, dad, son or daughter, grandparent, employee, CEO, only child, brother, sister, student, gym buddy, yoga lover, friend, counsellor, carer... The list is endless. These identities allow us to understand ourselves in relation to others, and to our surroundings or activities. Identity also creates a link with our heritage and history, and the incomplete and subtle ways in which knowledge is handed down from one generation to the next. In my work this sometimes appears (or disappears), leading to questions about whether the image represents an observation from reality or a hand-me-down memory conjured by the imagination. Though we label our identities to make connection, in reality they are unique. In that way our understanding of what we see is also unique. Likewise, each brushstroke: hard, messy, smooth - is unique, so is the mix of colours, which can have subtle variations.
My art studio is down a mud track, off a tiny Wealden country road. As well as it being home to my studio, it is also home to heritage cows, a trickling pond, an Oast house, to name a few. As the pond is near the South Downs Way, I thought the pond was a dew pond; dew ponds are small, round ponds sited in hollows, made by digging a pit and lining it with clay. They're found in a few dry, hilly places, like the South Downs, where there's no water running down the hillsides. This is because the rock underneath the surface, mostly chalk, is full of small openings and water drains away underground. I have now learnt that the soil around my studio is not chalk and does not drain easily, it is clay, thick and muddy, holding the water as firmly as a glass. If the pond near my studio isn't a dew pond, then what is it and what shall I name the painting of the pond?
Recently I discovered that there was an old English recipe called Sussex Pond Pudding and giggling with delight as I felt that this was a much more fitting name for my painting. Sussex Pond was born.
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