NEW STATEMENT brewing… (2024/2025)

STATEMENT (2019/2020 version)

In my practice, I reflect upon the peculiarities of the human condition. Through an existential lens I pull from personal memory, vivid dreams, and chilling nostalgia to fuel a painting.

I approach documentation with curiosity - from the obsessive capturing of single frames in films, to the consumption of the natural world through screens. The personal and collective perception of nature has been a pivotal area of investigation, ever since the realisation that our knowledge of the natural world is essentially constructed by our culture.

A personal attraction-repulsion to natural history dioramas sparked the exploration of manipulated natural forms such as landscaped gardens or, artificial foliage in waterparks. Through submerging in the strangeness of these ‘natural’ sites, evidence that we crave for the artificial or hyperreal emerges - and the possibility of the contemporary sublime is questioned.

Cinema feeds significantly into our culture and consequently, film stills are often used to guide the work - digitally collaged together with personal and collected imagery. The painting ‘Family Dinner Illuminated by The End Of The World’ (2020) uses a still from the 2009 film Fantastic Mr. Fox, a casually filmed volcanic eruption found on YouTube, as well as demons from Disney’s Fantasia. This composition is fed by a vivid dream of consecutive natural disasters - an earthquake, tsunami, and a volcanic eruption - witnessed from the uncomfortable comforts of a ‘home’ with a singular large glass window. The hopelessness of not being able to save the world and overwhelming fear of death spoke to the living experience today, inescapable from witnessing global crises from an unjustly desensitised distance.

To convey a narrative in mind, the collage acts as a foundation for the painting to emerge. Thinned down oil paints or water-based mediums are released onto the panel to achieve a chaotic freedom. These pigments are picked out in detail with thicker oil paints as abstract lines alluding to movement. Titles are of great importance, providing narratives and wordplay. For example, the bracketed phrase in ‘(No Place) Like Home’ (2019) emphasises the idea of a no-place being a place or, being in a place and feeling particularly displaced. For inspiration, I observe artists such as Janiva Ellis, Mark Dion, Paul Nash, and Bill Viola in the way they articulate their deep contemplations.

Through depicting constructed scenes from a constantly growing archive of online, cinematic, and personal sources, I seek to observe the world through a critical yet playful lens, reflecting upon the strangeness of the past, present, and future.