Model Car Graveyard, 2023

Sharp lines define the contours of a space, leaving us uncertain whether we are inside or outside of it. There is a brooding atmosphere in Model Car Graveyard (2023) by Hettie Inniss (1999, United Kingdom). The layered and splintered nature of the image is achieved by subtly divergent layers of paint that gleam through the image like ghostly apparitions; the trace of a fence, the suggestion of a shrubbery behind it, a cord dangling deliberately but mysteriously from a window frame.

            ‘Unlocking a lost memory – often triggered by a sight, sound or smell – can be intense, like you’ve been whiplashed into a different timeline,’ says Inniss. Her paintings are the experiences of this sort of involuntary memory, solidified into paint. Moments at which our senses are stimulated and the mind takes us to familiar or sinister places. Paint can slip away and fade, assert itself in a work loudly or in an undertone. What does a memory taste like, how does it sound, how can paint record these feelings?

 

Hettie Inniss lives and works in London (UK). She was awarded the Sir Frank Bowling Scholarship in 2022 and gained her MA Painting at the Royal College of Art, London (UK) in 2023. In 2023 she was asked by the Tate Collective to create a work of art in response to a work in their collection.