The passion for the process of painting continues to drive my practice. The image is drawn from the inconsistency of memory and the limits of imagination, overlaid with more present recollections and thoughts. Places and people stand out in memory, distorted and coloured by recollection. I do not feel my memory is something I can trust. Its elusive world is where particles of life cluster and disperse.

Using the landscape and human body as the stimulus and starting point, I attempt to investigate the layering of time in order to create a visual memory. Through the processes of mark making and colour investigation, moments of time are encapsulated as layers and the image is transformed: it is concealed and rediscovered through layering and building the picture surface, developing a theatrical sense of movement within the static image.

This engagement and response to what is happening on the canvas has the potential vitality and emotional charge that I want to evoke, for the viewer to fully engage and the work to stand on its own terms.

Landscape

I explore the intangibility of the present and the resonance of memory. I record the landscape and its fragility, where the remnants of its history, battles, invasion and the ravages of heavy industry, farming and now urbanisation, leave traces buried deep into the earth. A familiar landscape appears to revert to another state, while retaining the trace and the scars of its history.

Dancers

Memories of people in situations from the distant past are often overlaid by those of the more recent past, with each layer becoming more “present”. The paintings are a recording of time, and divergent outcomes can be understood as a possible metaphor for memory. These investigations are concerned with reframing the objectifying gaze at the female body, where the mask has fallen and she is subject, not object.

The Only Ones

This series of paintings originated as recollections of repetitive experiences of self-absorption and containment. The works explore contrasts of texture, colour, inside and outside, figuration and abstraction. Visual and emotional tension occurs through the juxtaposition of these opposing forces, to generate expressive power.

Doubles

These works play with the idea of the inner and outer self: of what is revealed and what is kept hidden. Concerns over issues of identity, gender, and the boundary within a private space mix with an investigation into such themes as seduction, intimacy and power.

Recent Work

The experience of a time shift, of being in the moment with thoughts from the past and yearnings from the future constantly overlapping and colliding have been the source of ideas that have the influenced the current work.