Through drawing and painting, I have long been interested in making imagery associated with the figure in motion: leaping, soaring, flying, falling and the associated emotions that these types of image can trigger in the viewer.
In much of my work, I am concerned with making images that convey a sense of power and energy or potential energy, and allude to movement through phsychological states. I take a very intuitive approach to my work and subject matter. It’s self-revelatory in retrospect but along the way I use it as a tool for processing my emotions and my own attempts to face and evade life and its pressures. Some of the work focuses on powerful forward movement and to a certain extent that feels like me harnessing my own strength and putting that out into the world. When the imagery is more about loss of control, it’s me working through feelings of overwhelm and helplessness but hopefully it touches on our fragility as human beings in a more general way.
Drawing has been at the forefront of my practice since my student days and continues to play a crucial role. I enjoy its directness and find that monochrome work serves to strip the image down focusing one on the subject. Where colour is used, I often use an intense but very limited palette to build emotion and drama.
Ultimately, my work is about the fragmented and fleeting nature of experience. The interplay between submission and will, the moving and the fixed and the figure and its environment which hint at the absurdity of narratives in a constantly changing world. Often the moments I’m looking to capture are those where we’re lost; in movement, in music, in a shard of light, in ourselves.
