I am a modernist painter who uses symbols and forms to explore the human condition in relationship to landscape, memory, activism, gender, and our entanglement with non-human worlds. In my paintings including the oils and watercolours, I see modernism and time as a subject as the root, in the sense that it is how I was trained and represents the possibility of the sublime and flow state. Flatness and intuitive colour are key elements of the paintings here; colour is made up in the moment hence being a colourist is a rhythmic experience, an emotional bandwidth, poetic, symbolic and societal commitment. I begin oil painting, make a ground and everything emerges out of this ground, whatever I place. In my watercolour work I see the white sheet as the modernist ground.  My process is emergent, it is a process of digging, putting paint on, taking it off, as if I find my paintings; I feel this creates presence and hold. The making process both relates to the subjects I explore and is the subject. It is a commitment to Heidegger’s ‘Dasein’, there-being or being-there (in time) in the making of paintings.

Painting is a search for truth. It is slippery in the sense that seeing truth comes and goes, it can’t be fixed as it is ever changing. But for me an ultimately successful painting is when I have seen something in the process that I haven’t seen before and then I can’t even say what it was that I witnessed in the making of the painting, it can manifest as a porous in-between state. A consideration of truth in the current situation of a changing climate is bringing in an open-ended series of questions including how we can be good ancestors; reflecting cosmic and mythic views; having empathy for different generations; recognising our entanglement with non-human worlds; and legacy, how and what we want to leave behind. My work often explores particular landscapes, being-there in nature whether or not it is contested land as well as the personal day to day-ness of living.