Kate Swayze | Painting

Artist Statement

Fabricated Memory
This series explores how family memories are transmitted and reinterpreted. Working from resurfaced family photographs, I do not recreate what the images depict; instead, I paint my perception of them after hearing the stories of those present in the photograph. The interplay of abstraction and representation mirrors the ambiguity of memory, giving equal importance to both the substrate and the subject. My understanding of family history becomes increasingly abstracted as it is reshaped through these retellings.

Central to this work is the substrate: my painting rags. Inherently tied to process and time, these materials act as records of making, carrying a kind of intrinsic truth. They also affirm the physicality of painting in a digital age, doing what only paint can do. Both the imagery and the rags hold the passage of time, documenting process and what it means to be a dynamic human. The rags are made from each concurrent painting, further replicating the cyclicality of time and then affixed to the canvas and fused with the imagery. The viewer is left to question whether this subconscious mark-making in the painting rags reveals a latent objective truth or instead reflects my own internal processing of family history. 

The inclusion of certain figures raises questions about presence and influence—who has shaped my memory enough to be depicted, and who remains absent. Where figures are missing, only the painting rag remains, pointing to absence as its own form of truth.

Figures fracture and fade, as memory does, dissolving back into the substrate from which they emerge to form a fabricated memory.