In these paintings, the making is part of the meaning. Each was built through a process of laying down, covering, scraping back and reworking, and the surface retains a record of that history. Loss, the passage of time and return are therefore things the paintings have undergone as well as things they describe.

‘Hermione’ has a recognisable figure whose face and body remain embedded in accumulated paint. Built up, scraped and rebuilt over time, the figure gradually emerged from the mass, the raised gesture giving her the quality of an apparition: woman, statue, memory and painting at once. This connects to the final scene of The Winter's Tale, where Shakespeare deliberately leaves the boundary between miracle, theatre, sculpture and illusion uncertain. The painting becomes concerned with the status of the image itself: when something lost returns, are we encountering the thing itself, a representation of it, or our memory of it?

Read together, the four paintings move through dissolving, burying, revealing and building up until something returns. The sequence of the play is also a sequence of making. These correspondences emerged through the process of painting rather than being planned in advance.

Simon Burton (b. 1973, Doncaster, UK) lives and works in London. He attained a BA at the University of Brighton (1992 – 1995) and an MA at the Royal College of Art (1995 – 1997). Burton has exhibited internationally including in Bulgaria, China, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Poland, Romania, S. Korea, USA and the UK. Burton’s paintings are held in many public and private collections in China, Europe, USA and the UK.