Recent Work

I have recently been painting in oils, and especially been interested in adding beeswax which gives a translucent and waxy kind of quality to the paint. The body it gives enables me to make very textured surfaces both by pressing into and scraping away. There’s something about the push and pull of adding, removing, trying to play with the boundary of the physical skin of the surface of the object. I always have a desire, whatever I’m making to wrestle with the form, to try to stretch and push it to become something other than what it is. I want to open up the boundary between what is painting and what is not painting, what is paint and what is the air pressing up into it. I imagine if I do that enough then something more ethereal can come through, something that is immaterial but somehow held in the material of the paint. I want to to break through some kind of barrier between worlds and reveal what is underlying everything.

I am interested in very old stone built monuments which lie buried or sometimes restored in the countryside in the UK. Longbarrows and bronze age round barrows, thousands of years old remain, left by unimaginable people. I think these places are where the boundary between the immaterial and the material is stretched and made thin. Imagery from these architchtural objects makes it’s way into the paintings too.