CANDYISTAN

114.5 cm X 114.5cm
Acrylic on canvas
Is a place that evokes happy memories and feelings. It has the colours of candy or the boiled sugar sweet often associated with childhood mollification and indulgence. 'Candyistan' therefore becomes a country (with the suffix 'istan') that is the equivalent of childhood memories, laughter, playfulness, splashing around in water, climbing trees, falling and getting up again. 'Candyistan' is a place far away from the enervating concerns and demands of adulthood. It is perhaps an expanded 'cake-house' of the Hansel and Gretel story that I greatly enjoyed as a child, more for its abundance of cake, biscuit and candies than anything else. This one is an attempt to evoke a non-terrestrial country, whose sweet, dreamy and nebulous landscape exists within each of us but whose inherent elusiveness leaves us sad and wanting and fantasising about a time when we had no abiding cares or fears or worries.