WORK
SERIES
FORCES, 2020-1
These paintings are a result of the experience of lockdown. Painting without a plan or agenda, they were about moving forwards gently through extreme uncertainty - making a small change here and seeing what small change was then needed - and finally stepping back to make sense of what has emerged.
TREE SERIES, 2018
These images are made up tracings from black and white photographs of trees taken from vintage books and magazines. Between the graininess of the image, the picture coming through from the other side and the low levels of the light box, the image being traced was not always clear. The tracings became an exercise in trust and patience, working on one small part at any time without much of a sense of how the final image would look in the end. What emerged was a series of images which have a natural organic rhythm, resembling vast river systems seen from the air, or parts of a nervous system seen through a microscope.
Repeating this process revealed different details within the original image, parts previously hidden were suddenly navigable and vice versa, and layering these up brought new dimensions to the bigger picture, bringing the tree back to life as if emerging through a heavy fog. The graph paper became a container, and seemed to point to our need to measure and map however unquantifiable the steps we take may be.
TREATMENTS WHAT WE FIND, 2019
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In January 2019 I found a box of 18 glass plate negatives in an antique shop in North London. This sparked a year long investigation into what they showed, what they were and where they might have come from.
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TREATMENTS, WHAT WE BRING, 2019
A complimentary series to Treatments/What we find, these works take the images from the glass plate negatives as a skeleton frame for otherwise imagined oil paintings. I projected from the plates onto blue ground and bluntly traced the monochrome image using a single inky tone and a palate knife before finishing the paintings intuitively. Introducing heightened or unnatural colour seems to have highlighted the feelings the images inspired in me by virtue of their likely context - both in the push of anxiety and the pull of domesticity and nostalgia.
