'Pain Points - A Way In' by Bex Salter

Seawhite of Brighton support and work with practicing artists and young professionals. Bex Salter is a new emerging artist, recently graduated from Royal College of Art. Here she explains how her recent work developed and why she chooses the materials she uses. You can view more of her work on Instagram @bexsalterstudio.

'Pain Points' for me means the representation of the internal in the physical. It is very exposing for me, a vulnerable release, as well as a time in my career where I feel I have the tools, skills and time to make art that intervenes, art that gets under your skin. I feel responsible for the people who may need these specific paintings and believe it is a necessary contribution of honesty in a time that is consistently tentative, and emotionally diluted, under the pressure of commercialism.

It feels alien for me to admit this body of work has a right to exist outside of my own personal infrastructure, but I’m admitting it anyway; admitting “them”. This series does not feel bound, structured or limited. It looks inward to turmoil that’s pre-existing, not only in art, but further. It looks to the human experience, to why these paintings can not only be a representation of the pressures themselves, but also the individual cures.

Like pinpricks, each work, each brushstroke, or tear shed creates a hole in the steep walls I have built up around myself, and this serves as evidence in my first attempt in bringing those walls down through painting.

'Pain Points' for me came naturally at a time of feeling like my life and body has made a vital decision, finally shedding the task of clinging to my previous self. I was living in my "then" body, instead of now, in this reality I’m so grateful for. It’s also a documentation of internalised and memorable points in my life, but in a way that is reflective not depressive. The human figure is there as a space for this all to exist. The body becomes a place to experiment with feeling, so overwhelmingly that it dissolves into this tangled abstraction.

Maybe the "internal" to me feels rationally physical, the maze of deep crimson veins, or a soft green and purple bruises on the skin that encapsulates it all. That’s what I want, for the paint to feel like a path in, past the external barrier, to the claustrophobic, crowded and lost "centre". The marks are a communication of how I felt in those moments for such a long time.

The square panel becomes either encapsulating and trapping, or its edges are free and endlessly expanding. Based selfishly on the duality between my old and new self, frantically trying to keep my head above water amongst this pivotal moment I’ve hit. There’s this thin swaying edge between my past self and all possible future outcomes for my distant self, a duality in the sense of the conscious and subconscious, the happy and sad, the healthy and sick. It feels like a documentation in my purest possible sense, from my head, through my body, through my hand and onto board in marks of paint.

The wooden surface is not underestimated. To me it’s a floorboard, a sense of home, like each wooden panel is a piece of the house I live in; my body. The paint is wearing it in, wearing it down but, most importantly, recollecting what brought me to this exact moment, body and mind, with an overwhelming gratitude to be sharing these moments through art.

Bex Salter is a British artist based in Essex, with an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art. @bexsalterstudio. She uses Seawhite Cradled Wooden Panels.