A Moment's Existence /
This project questions what it means to be alive, dissolving the boundaries between mediums. Beneath each image lies a veiled structure – grisaille and glaze, memory and matter – through which fleeting human presence emerges.
The work is deeply personal, shaped by the loss of those around me and a growing awareness of my own mortality. Inspired by eroded Roman sculptures seen during repeated visits to Italy—where time has softened once-defined figures into abstraction—these paintings invite the viewer to complete the story. The incomplete, the half-formed, and the broken all retain a haunting trace of human existence. This tension between form and erasure, reality and abstraction, mirrors the impermanence of life itself.
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Phillips-McLaren approaches each piece without preconceived ideas, allowing the work to evolve through instinct, memory, and mistake. The process is both deliberate and accidental—drawn, redrawn, erased, and remade—embracing imperfection and the raw materiality of hand-mixed pigment, charcoal, and glazes. Many works begin with a black and white grisaille underpainting—a technique used by the Old Masters—then dissolve through layers of colour, abstraction, and mark-making. Though photography played a role in the process for some of these pieces, it is now almost entirely obscured—becoming part of the work’s concealed foundations—and may still linger subtly within certain layers.
Vulnerability is central to this practice. Each mark invites the next in a dialogue between intention and accident. The fragile materials mirror the fragility of being: charcoal reduced to dust, pigments shifting with time, nothing fixed or final. These layered portraits provoke reflection on identity, mortality, and what lies beneath appearances.
In a world of instant imagery and scrolling attention spans, A Moment’s Existence invites slow looking. It resists the polished finish of traditional portraiture, instead offering glimpses, echoes, and disruptions. Truth appears not in sharp clarity but in the smudged edge of a drawing, in the rhythm between recognition and ambiguity.
Influenced by Jungian psychology, especially the concepts of shadow, individuation, and archetype, the project explores duality, transformation, and the unconscious. Many of the works are named after figures from Greek mythology—Iphigenia, Melinoë, and others—invoking the timeless themes of death, memory, rebirth, and metamorphosis. These mythic names extend the symbolic resonance of each portrait, linking the personal with the archetypal.
A moment, in its simplest sense, is brief—a passing fragment of time. But when inhabited fully, a moment becomes weighty, sacred—a marker of connection, awareness, and presence. These paintings dwell in that fragile space. They are not merely depictions, but acts of being: layered, ephemeral, and alive.
Ultimately, A Moment’s Existence is a meditation on impermanence. In the face of loss and uncertainty, the act of making becomes a form of resistance—a way to be present, if only for a moment.
