I recently spent a couple of years travelling and living in Asia . While staying for almost a year in Saigon I worked on what I call the 'Tourist series' - about 15 paintings, some of which are on this site. This work is all painted in oil, very traditionally despite its print-like qualities.
I wanted these paintings to reflect on how we look at the foreign. What we look at as tourists - the things we choose to depict, take photos of and simulate in a story combined of photos, souvenirs, suntans and the retelling of ‘experiences’ - are the things which differ from what we know. In these paintings I’ve simply done what every tourist does: I’ve picked something I feel represents a place from my narrow viewpoint, elected it to being of some imaginary importance, painted it completely out of context, sometimes on its own, sometimes in unlikely juxtapositions, and as such representing not just snippets of the country itself, but more so the tourist’s view of it, which is all that holiday snaps and exotic experiences can be expected to do.

'Pettersson’s Tourist Series represents the artist’s most recent body of work, produced after one and a half years of adventures throughout China, Australia, and South East Asia, where she extensively photographed, collected impressions and filled notebooks with sketches. The artist explains that this series remarks on the way travellers attempt to understand that which is unfamiliar or exotic to them, commenting on the tourist’s necessarily limited experience. Pettersson’s sometimes humorous out of context imagery are like cut outs or symbols, echoing the stereotypical or limited way tourists often see new places.
The solid and thick outlines of Pettersson’s figures recall Pop Art, the graphic nature of the work showing influence of Pettersson’s background in design, as well as her regard for the direct and simple messages of propaganda posters and vintage commercial advertisements.’
Maura Ruskin, October 2006, Tel Aviv,  Dollinger Art Project www.dollingerartproject.com

Whilst the work from Vietnam looked at the exotic, my painting since returning concerns very intimately familiar, domestic spaces.
By painting domestic objects and patterns I aim to say something about our need to ‘make a home’, however fleeting, and how we place our marks on our surroundings in a nest-making-like process. In reality these objects, patterns or decorations are often completely overlooked, regardless of their history, their story or possible meaning. Even after painting them - looking at them, representing and exaggerating them - its still not sure whether there are any answers at all to be had about the individual who lovingly choose, were given or inherited these items or spaces, or if they are just soulless objects in meaningless contexts, representing nothing apart from the banality of everyday existence.