Your early twenties are a peculiar time. Closer to your formative years than you think. You work hard to wrap yourself into a newer, emboldened identity. Little do you know this identity will run its course and, voila, another identity arrives. Just in time for you to slip it on and edge, ever closer to the person you believe you want to be. And as you move along with this new identity you experience its daily routines. Same but different than yesteryear. New people appear in this new world of this new you. It feels like natural progression. It is. With every new identity you are awarded a new set of experiences. As though the identity is the key to unlocking the world before you and a signal for others to join you. Every passing year moves by and with that layer upon layer of new identities thicken. Until, like a wall layered in decades of the latest and greatest colours - the colours you believed would best represent you - begin to sluff. Fragments shed like thin skin. “I like that one.” you say, “meh, not so much” you say to the next one. On and on it goes. Colours like layers like identities, you are left holding but a few. And under all of that is one colour, one layer, one identity you believed was not to be. But there it is. The first one. Staring back at you - all the memories of all the people who shared that space flood your senses. They, so long forgotten, are so well remembered.

This is how I feel about Anna’s latest work.

Ambiguous yet familiar – the figures in her work did not pose for her. These works are from memory and feeling.  Anna adjusts the subjects when she needs to. Enlarges, elongates, shifts proportions. She connects the viewer with how the figure sits in her mind. The texture of the paint carries a lot of the load. Some parts of the work are thickened and built up over time. Other parts are thinned to a dripping wash.

All of this combines to create emotion.

In Trust Me, two young girls stand side by side. Close, but with a small gap between them. The gap holds as much weight as the figures themselves. Are they coming together, are they parting for the time being? The figures are there but not fully rendered. The background is dark and open. There are no details to locate them in a specific place. Without a setting, attention stays on the figures and the space between them. What place in time does this hold for Anna? Alternatively, Hugs for Myself is a closed gestural painting. It is protective and self-contained. The first thing that stands out is the structure of the body. The arms are large and curve around the figure in a strong circular motion. They organize the whole image. They create a shape that holds the figure together. Turning inward - giving comfort and receiving it. Holding oneself together. The red and pink tones offer a feeling of warm fleshiness. In Sickeningly Sweet the viewer sees two soft bodies eating soft ice cream. Their proximity creates tension across the image. The title sets the tone - suggesting something that is too much. Not sweet, but overdone. Past the point of comfort. The image follows that idea. What looks like closeness begins to feel excessive, or unstable. This changes how the closeness reads. The distortion of the bodies is key. It prevents the viewer from settling into a comfortable moment.

There are many more memories still to come as Anna moves forward onto the long, complex path of her life. Like the layers of paint in her work, these experiences will build, and at times fall away. At which time she will have a clearer understanding of herself and she will look back on these pieces as markers of who she was and, in turn, who she became.