Lisa McKendrick allows her paintings to “happen” like a Freudian slip or a slip of the tongue. In doing this she taps into archetypal imagery, symbols and fragments of the psyche in a backdrop of landscapes that seem remote, haphazard and out of this world. Here, she playfully masters the technique of catching the painting while it wasn’t looking.

Amongst the absurd combinations of unanchored fragments a narrative emerges from the whole image, not insomuch as story telling but rather in its temperature, its speed, or in the emotion of the space it inhabits, for example a landscape appears as ‘hot’ ‘fast’ or ‘large’ or the sky as “nicotine stained walls”, the cityscapes as “edgy”.

Death plays a starring role in McKendrick’s paintings as it is comically caught up in daily life, doing lifelike things while crossing inaccessible dreamscapes of the mind and defying the very definition of being dead by behaving alive. McKendrick gives a new life to death almost in a ritualistic way, much the same as the ways that are found in Alchemical transformations of inner death and rebirth.