Where Are You (2018) draws from Ena Swansea’s archive of photographic source material, yet the vast scale and blurred surface create a scene that resists identification. The painting’s compositional elements are reduced and refined until forms lose their specificity, becoming suggestive rather than descriptive. What may have originated as a real location is transformed into a space that sits on the edge of memory and perception. Swansea has noted that “certain images are flexible; they can be about different things depending on who is looking.”

The canvas is primed with Swansea’s distinctive graphite mixture, producing a reflective surface that lends the work a cinematic and elusive quality. Layers of oil and acrylic sit above this metallic ground, shifting with the light and disrupting spatial coherence. The result is a surface that appears both still and in motion, where light and form pass through one another and the image refuses to settle.