Artist Statement
Nerine is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice is grounded in photography and extends into painting and mixed media. She engages with photography not simply as a resource but as a conceptual framework, one that allows her to navigate memory, perception, and the complexities of neurodivergence. Her work contemplates the tension between the ephemeral and the enduring, drawing from family archives and her analog photography to construct visual narratives that straddle temporal boundaries and subjective experience.
Central to her practice is an exploration of disability, neurodivergence, and cognition, particularly through the lenses of Aphantasia, ADHD, and Bipolar Disorder. For much of her life, these conditions went undiagnosed, significantly disrupting her ability to sustain a consistent artistic practice. The revelation that she has Aphantasia, the inability to visualize, brought about a profound shift in her understanding of herself and her creative impulses. Where others can conjure visuals internally, Nerine experiences a blank mental space, making photography and representational imagery vital cognitive tools. Her dependency on a visual reference becomes not only a preference but a necessary bridge between the external world and her internal landscape.
Object permanence is often an issue for individuals with ADHD, emerging as a recurring theme in her work, not only in its literal sense but as a metaphor for loss, memory, and emotional presence. The analog photographic process, its tactile and material nature, serves as an antidote to this instability. For Nerine, shooting, developing, and printing film offers a corporeal, grounded counterpoint to digital ephemera. It reinforces the “realness” of things that might otherwise fade from memory or mental access, anchoring her experience in something physically tangible.
Nostalgia functions both as an aesthetic and a conceptual device in her work. Through the layering of archival and personal imagery, she invokes an ambivalent longing for a past she never lived — a constructed time imbued with aesthetic idealism yet shadowed by a stark awareness: her survival in those eras, as a disabled person, would have been improbable. This critical self-awareness complicates her relationship with historical references and technologies, creating a paradox of desire and denial.
In her painting practice, Nerine has become increasingly invested in disrupting the fidelity of the photographic source. A professor once said to her, “Great, you can draw, now what?”, which sparked an internal revelation that there is little value in precisely recreating a photograph. So, rather than replicating images indiscriminately, she intervenes through superimposition, fragmentation, and intentional incompletion, which allow areas of abstraction, ambiguity, or unresolved space. These disruptions reflect the fragmented nature of memory, perception, and the neurodivergent experience. The introduction of secondary images within a single composition enables more personal and layered narratives to emerge, inviting viewers into the simultaneity of past and present, clarity and confusion.
At its core, Nerine’s work is an act of translation, turning intangible, internal realities into visual form. Her use of layering and optics, both formal and symbolic, reflects a continuous effort to reconcile the instability of memory, the slippery nature of identity, and reality. Art becomes not only a channel for energy but a means of processing, surviving, and making visible what cannot be conjured in the mind alone.