For me painting slows down the act of looking; it invites the gaze to linger upon the otherwise overlooked. With a focus on the intersections of painting with cinema, photography and music, I edit and translate photographic ‘stills’ into oil paintings, drawing on found moving imagery, my own photographs, and drawings rendered directly from my imagination.
My practice is indebted to the painterly tradition of still life, and in particular vanitas works – symbolic still lifes that communicate earthly transience and the inevitability of death. My paintings depict detailed fragments divorced from greater narratives, rendering those fragments both descriptive and abstract, ambiguous and open-ended. Multiple thin layers of paint are applied to the canvas, to produce varied optical effects – the immediacy of the paint’s surface playing off against the hazy, half-remembered qualities characteristic of my chosen images. Manipulation of colour and cropping in combination with mark-making techniques, play upon the latent, dreamlike sense of otherness found, in particular, in cinema, reimagining this upon the canvas.
I have exhibited widely in recent years and participated in numerous projects, performances and artist residencies both nationally and internationally. In 2015 I was invited to be Artist in Residence at Alewive Brook Road in New York, former residence and studio of Elaine De Kooning. I was shortlisted for the Contemporary British Painting Prize (2018); granted a CVAN Creative Spaces Residency (2020); and was awarded the BEEP Painting prize and the Ares Mosaic Art Award (both in 2022). In 2023 my work was acquired by the Government Art Collection, UK.
I am represented by Workplace gallery and a member of Contemporary British Painting.
