STATEMENT

I make paintings, drawings, prints and ceramics where emblematic figures look out at the viewer or interact in surreal tableaus. My output consists of small-scale originals and editions that reflect my commitment to medium specific processes and the hand-made.

My main inspiration is the figure and how, from prehistory onwards, it has been used to explain our place in the universe. Themes of power, vulnerability and desire feature strongly, and I am especially drawn to examples in medieval and Asian art when the figure has a frontal stance. The figure continues to play a central role in popular culture today, and despite the legacy of specific narratives continues to speak to underlying patterns of behaviour, systems and structures that connect us all.

I work instinctively, allowing ideas and memories to emerge through making. Feelings find form through matrices of figurative and abstract elements. After some time a scenario arises from the contrast of flatness and volume, while decisions about colour, form and surface evolve slowly. These working methods move between constraint and liberation until a sense of an independent presence arrives. The feeling is of lived experience linked to that which has gone before.

By spending time with my work I want the viewer to feel more alive to meaning on their own terms. There is a form of conjuring between artist, artwork and viewer, and the viewer by necessity must play their part. This means accepting the paradox that in our globally connected, image-saturated world, singular interpretations are impossible, even if this was once the artist's original intent.