A&D ANNUAL 2021

Xanthe Muston

Working with a range of materials from oil paint to gouache, watercolour and charcoal, Xanthe Muston seeks to capture quiet and often overlooked moments in everyday life, finding complexity within them. Xanthe’s recent practice has revolved around themes of memory, identity, and the narratives we construct to make sense of both. She is interested in the ways memory becomes distorted or confused in our attempts to recall and articulate its nature: it’s almost as if by striving for accuracy, we move further from the truth. This is seen in drawings such as, ‘We Remember Through Photographs’ where Xanthe explores how photographs come to replace memories of lived experiences. In this way, she illustrates the complicated way that we recall, preserve, and ultimately fictionalise the past to give us a sense of ease in the present. In other artworks like ‘I Couldn’t (Can’t) Explain It’, Xanthe instead turns to literature, drawing from Raymond Carver’s short story ‘Why Don’t You Dance’, to show the limits of language and expression to capture some moments of human connection.