Artist Statement
For me, the choice to make a painting is in itself a choice to reference and engage with the past. To interact with and decontextualise that which has come before us and that which will be there long after we are gone.
Drawing inspiration from a diverse range of different subject matter, my work is often anchored by appropriated imagery from art history, film stills and familiar recurring motifs. In particular the movement, drama and light in Baroque masterpieces. What really interests me is why one is drawn to a particular image or motif, and how to portray that emotional resonance through the material. How one idea can run through a series of paintings like a thread tying them together and cement a transient thought on to more permanent ground.
I re-imagine universal stories and myths; highlighting their power, beauty, and often absurdity, and explore how they play a role in a contemporary narrative and collective memory. I want the work to interrogate the timelessness of human nature, and the complications which make us human.
Hinting to each works ancestry, and questioning our ineluctable relationship with the past, I want my work to create a dialogue between past and contemporary modes of representation. To sit in a dreamlike realm between reality as we know it and something otherworldly; existing somewhere between the past, present and future. Whilst deeply grounded in figuration, I also want my work to speak of its process, to show the spontaneity and chance within the act of painting itself.
My practice is rooted in a desire to use painting as a method to reveal rather than just record. I use an almost subtractive method of working ; applying and then wiping back through the surface, creating form with very thin glazes on top of much thicker gestural marks and manipulating the paint so that light emanates almost from within the canvas.
Painting itself is this wonderful collision of alchemy and idea, I want to celebrate that alchemy and use the process of painting simultaneously as an act of both the excavation and construction of an image.
