Fleur Stevenson’s painting “Garage” is part of a series of works that explores memory, personal history and place.  They investigate translating childhood memories from personal experiences and from family accounts, which occurred within familial landscapes in New Zealand. 
 
The painting “Garage” considers the physical environment and the associated ideas, feelings and emotions and the space the memories occupy on the surface, as an interior (self) and exterior (outside view of self). 
 
For this body of work, canvas was cut to size according to the location of each memory and taken to New Zealand to work on at each site. Imprints and rubbings from the ground form the initial layers, establishing part of the painting’s history, where subsequent layers build the intuitive response to the site and reveal the memory as a character or landscape.
 
By placing herself at each location and responding to a memory, Fleur considers the relationship of her internal thought as an interior, situated in the exterior of a landscape or place. This spatial relationship is investigated in each composition in varying ways, by a clearly defined boundary for example (“Garage”), or where the spaces overlap. Fleur considers how the vantage point of this space shifts to where the viewer is positioned or distanced from the work (exterior), looking in where the artwork becomes an interior.