‘What haunts us is something inaccessible from which we cannot extricate ourselves. It is that which cannot be found and therefore cannot be avoided’.
Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature
I draw on memory, metaphor, and fragments of experience in the creation of my work, all of which seeks to describe the complex and mysterious terrain of the inner life through an engagement with materials and the act of making. In an open-ended exploration of the real and the imagined, the representational and the abstract, forms emerge that demand to be worked with and resolved.
The starting points for my work vary to include found or made images and objects, abstract forms and spaces and stories and anecdotes; but the aim for the work is the same – to invest the material with a psychological and emotional charge, a charge that goes on to create a pervading atmosphere of tension and disquiet.
Like a house, a painting becomes a physical and psychological location, a site that acts as a carrier for a lived and sensed experience of the world. It provides a structure inside which minutiae are amplified and the dramas of the everyday are played out and made manifest. A space of familiarity and belonging, it is also easily destabilised, harbouring within it the ability to displace and disconcert those who encounter it.
Objects and things can be as anchors in this precarious space, and they are often present in the work, their mundane nature offering up the possibility to act as instruments for allegory or narrative. There is a constantly evolving interplay between varying levels of representation and abstraction in the work, and this relationship is grappled with during the painting process – the image is at once retrieved and obscured, locking it in a perpetual state of becoming.
With a focus on an intuitive engagement with material, the work is grounded in a phenomenological approach, where what is sought is located largely in sensory or perceptual understanding – in a desire to express in visual and material terms, that which is felt and sensed rather than that which is seen.
Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature
I draw on memory, metaphor, and fragments of experience in the creation of my work, all of which seeks to describe the complex and mysterious terrain of the inner life through an engagement with materials and the act of making. In an open-ended exploration of the real and the imagined, the representational and the abstract, forms emerge that demand to be worked with and resolved.
The starting points for my work vary to include found or made images and objects, abstract forms and spaces and stories and anecdotes; but the aim for the work is the same – to invest the material with a psychological and emotional charge, a charge that goes on to create a pervading atmosphere of tension and disquiet.
Like a house, a painting becomes a physical and psychological location, a site that acts as a carrier for a lived and sensed experience of the world. It provides a structure inside which minutiae are amplified and the dramas of the everyday are played out and made manifest. A space of familiarity and belonging, it is also easily destabilised, harbouring within it the ability to displace and disconcert those who encounter it.
Objects and things can be as anchors in this precarious space, and they are often present in the work, their mundane nature offering up the possibility to act as instruments for allegory or narrative. There is a constantly evolving interplay between varying levels of representation and abstraction in the work, and this relationship is grappled with during the painting process – the image is at once retrieved and obscured, locking it in a perpetual state of becoming.
With a focus on an intuitive engagement with material, the work is grounded in a phenomenological approach, where what is sought is located largely in sensory or perceptual understanding – in a desire to express in visual and material terms, that which is felt and sensed rather than that which is seen.