Early works on paper and canvas, Toronto 1987-1988

Describing these works as ‘landscapes’ is to associate the drawings with ‘activities that take place on a ground or field’ and places the works within the tradition of painting and the history of art. “The frame of history, of painting, is something that has to be negotiated in all its messiness, that has to be in a sense stepped outside of, and worked within, simultaneously.”1

Repetition and returning to an original state are processes that Anne-Marie uses in her work. In these drawings, the mark-making is repetitive, claiming and disclaiming the surface and the space. The use of all-over colour and repetitive patterning serves to extend the boundaries of the frame, perhaps even denying them their limiting function.

The actions of organizing the structures in the works, dividing, separating, isolating individual elements and then joining and interrelating the signs and marks into new structures is at the root of this and her current work. What is revealed is an architecture, a framework, a result of finding structure within the space of drawing and painting. Reinforcing these notions are titles such as Frieze, Portico and Labyrinth, architectural elements related to the history of art.

1 John Roberts, Painting and Sexual Difference, Parachute 55, p.30