ARTIST STATEMENT

    In my painting I am concerned with the act of relationship, with the self as expressed through the process of painting and with the interrelationships of the world around us. I am interested in change, growth, and personal perception – cycles of decay and renewal – deconstruction and reconstruction.

    I choose to explore these ideas through my relationship with the medium; the materials and methods become the dominant driver in my work. I begin without predetermined conclusions, but with the simple intention to respond. Allowing my internal landscape to come forward, I work intuitively and abstractly, with as little self-censoring as possible, drawing from this vast, boundless, immeasurable space.

   Through a progression of layered materials, mark making, erasure and abrasion, a surface is established that alludes to an undisclosed history and speaks of curiosity, need, identity and compulsion. The resulting imagery is often ambiguous, challenging perceptions, and building relationship, by asking the viewer to find their own definition for the work.

    In my most recent work I am further exploring the concept of decay and renewal. I begin by mounting papers onto panel and then build up the surface with drawing media and paint.               

      Through a process of sanding, abrading and incising the surface I take away information and then respond to what remains, adding more paint and paper to the surface. This continues as a cycle of   reconstruction and deconstruction until the piece rests as a palimpsest of marks and materials, achieving some connectedness that feels relevant for me and evokes an emotional response.

     My work has been described as abstract contemporary. I find this description accurate, as I’m searching for a quality in my painting that feels earthy, rooted and evocative of another place and time. 

     The painting evolves, not consciously, but rather from a sensibility that feels its way along. I’ve always responded to transitional beauty, poignancy and impermanence. It is my hope that my work can convey to the viewer this truthfulness of our external world, where entropy is always in action, transforming and stripping away what seems permanent.

      My emphasis on process is a nod to the work of non-objective, this allowed me in my internal processes and emotions to take shape through their painting. It’s this engagement with the ideas of automatism and the exploration of what comes forward when attempting to work from the subconscious – my internal landscape – finding some illusionary truth, that is at the core of my work.