scarlett freeman

Our homes are ever growing entities, constant witnesses to our lives. Our belongings are companions we take with us as we move from home to home. We never stop adding to and changing the collections of things we surround ourselves with, but the home is just our attempt to create a personal space that allows us to fit into an urban landscape: it is only through a home that we live in a city. As you’re walking home, or to work, or the shop, you walk a few meters forward and there can be a complete atmospheric shift in your surroundings. The moment we step into a space we have an instinctual feeling about it, but in the streets this feeling unpredictably ebbs and flows along every meter.

I am a Glasgow based painter and printmaker from the south of Scotland. Using drawing, painting and lithography, my work depicts the mundane scenes of the places I call home and the streets that make up my daily journeys, focusing on capturing the twisted version of these places that exist in my memory. The work is still and quiet, often ghostly, using limited, dark, colour palettes and thin glazing layers of oil paint to build images which focus on contrast and atmosphere. I have built on the psychogeographic idea of the “flâneur” but with a focus and acceptance of the overlooked and the mundane. My work acts as a way of cataloging and immortalising the essence of places as I remember them to be, placing my indoor and outdoor worlds side by side to allow us to consider each with aspects of the other; our homes as interesting, morphing environments, and the streets as somewhere which can hold just as much intimacy, character, and personal feelings as a home.