From Autumn 2024 to Summer 2025, I produced three series of nearly fifty large scale canvases during my time at the Royal College of Art. Across Imperfect, Unbroken and Monument, I explored how memory, identity and physical resilience might be embodied through paint.

Working with oil, peinture d’essence, dry media, gloss and sgraffito, I built surfaces through accumulation, erasure and exposure. The figure is repeatedly made, disrupted and recovered, becoming less a fixed image than something shaped by time, memory and material process.

The series examine my continuing relationship with figuration and with the instability of ideas around the heroic, the sacred and the monumental. The multi-panel format shown at the RCA in 2025 deliberately recalls the structure of a devotional altarpiece, but replaces certainty and resolution with fragmentation and ambiguity.

This body of work has become an important foundation for my doctoral research at the Courtauld Institute of Art on Leon Kossoff and modern painting. The paintings and the research share a central question: what happens when a painting is understood not simply as an image, but as the material residue of an embodied and temporal act?

Rooted partly in my own experience of physical disability, these works consider vulnerability, resilience, presence and loss without treating the figure as illustration. Instead, painting becomes a way of testing how experience can remain present in material form.