STATEMENT

My work is concerned with the role of painting in a contemporary context, examining the way it is approached and disseminated in the world today.  This research manifests in various strategies such as an investigation of paint’s formalist aspects, by considering the nature of pictorial representation, exploring the possibilities of paint’s materiality and through referencing other paintings within my own work.  I use this appropriation as a tool to place my work within the wider canon of painting, referencing that which has gone before while attempting to situate my practice in the context of contemporary painting. 

My paintings present the viewer with a continually shifting pictorial language developed through the core activity of painting.  This imagery suggests alternate universes, virtual worlds and constructed realities; of a world similar to our own but one that we cannot ever fully grasp.  The term ‘idios kosmos’, first used by author Philip K Dick, denotes that we each have our own unique observations and understanding of how the world operates.  This is a fundamental concept in my approach to painting and image making. 

Having become interested in the processual aspect of painting, I have adopted a more gestural and dynamic way of applying pigment to surface.  It is the relationships within the picture plane that are of significance to me as a painter, by creating a tension between colours, surfaces, and spaces I aim to make an image that is both flat and illusionistic.  The research of my practice is firmly rooted in the production and accumulation of the paintings themselves, as this is the greatest way of understanding the material and accepting the medium as subject matter.