Mollie Balshaw

My practice makes use of the capabilities of painting within an expanded field, exploring the painting as an object rather than an image, and challenging restrictive structures often associated with painting practice. I am as interested in deconstruction as reconstruction, questioning the very concept of the structures and surfaces on which paintings exist, and in which painting as a subject exists. The pieces delve into means of portraying a non-binary position in painting, finding grounds to visually explore gender outside of gender through abstraction. Painting is caught up in this push and pull between femininity and masculinity, and what these mean iconically. Identifying as non-binary, I find myself stuck in this whirlwind of tropes, questioning where a painter like me fits amongst the history of painting. As such, my work attempts to be a mediator within this divide.