Practice

My work begins with painting itself: with what happens when an image is repeatedly made, disturbed, scraped back and remade. I am interested in the point at which paint stops simply describing something and begins to carry the history of its own making.

Working largely through figuration, I build paintings over extended periods. Forms are established, lost and recovered; surfaces are stained, wiped, drawn into and repainted. Earlier decisions often remain visible beneath later ones, so that the finished work contains a record of hesitation, revision and persistence.

Time is therefore part of the subject. I am less interested in arriving quickly at a resolved image than in allowing a painting to accumulate through repeated acts of looking and adjustment. The figure may provide the starting point, but the work develops through the physical encounter between image, material and the decisions made in front of the canvas.

My practice sits within a long engagement with figurative painting, while asking how that tradition can remain alive rather than simply inherited. I am interested in paintings that retain some evidence of their difficulty: surfaces in which representation and material experience remain unresolved, and where the act of making continues to be felt in the image that remains.