"The Golem series of paintings was inspired by the idea of creating a kind of portraiture concerned with the reanimation of the paint and image through the painting process. A Golem could be defined in Jewish folklore as ' an animated anthropomorphic being created entirely from inanimate matter', it is also said that the disability of the Golem is its inability to speak. With these paintings I was interested in investigating how these attributes also relate to my practice, and painting in general, transforming these small, lost objects (the source material is a snapshot photograph, so this small lost object is transformed into a powerful being made of paint. Each image was chosen for its formal qualities and the physical relationship between the subject and viewer when enlarged as a painting. With the subjects gaze directly meeting the viewer a power shift occurs as the viewer realises they are in fact the viewed." Laura Lancaster 2012