Dream Home 2014

Zoe Hawk’s painting, Dream Home, invites us into a world both familiar and strange. The surface is smooth, almost dreamlike, with colours laid down in flat, considered planes, and it's clear this work has been crafted with care, in a layered process.   It's interesting how Hawk sets up this contrast between the little girl in the foreground, kneeling in the grass, opening something in the ground - maybe a portal to another place? - compared to the pristine domestic scene hovering in the background, which feels staged and not that realistic. What a weird world she makes! A world of potential, a world of secrets, a world that is both magical and unsettling, kind of like when you wake up in the middle of the night after a dream. I'm put in mind of other contemporary figurative painters, like Kaye Donachie, who use a similar flattening of space and form, and also create their own dreamlike narratives.