About me

I’m a brighton based painter and ceramicist working from my studio in the Lanes at Brighton Art Space after recently graduating from Newcastle University. In both my ceramics and paintings I work in an open-ended process, layering and scraping back the surface of the paint and glaze, embracing imperfections and letting chance work with intent, falling in and out of control of the medium. Through dissolving dimensional boundaries in my paintings, I aim to lead the viewer into a dreamlike world where the familiar is made strange, and then familiar once again. Each painting has been a number of others in their creation, traces from every stage remain in the final image, the abstract marks converge into warped figurations imbued with mystery.

My current body of work stems from my fascination with the subconscious and unconscious mind, through dreams and memories. How they can unknowingly determine our behaviour like a silent driving force of our self. I strive to visualise and create self reflection upon this in my work, in a familiar yet strange way, similar to the subconscious. I want the works, in particular the paintings, to totally absorb the viewer in a visual language that could feel solely individual yet universal. Focusing in and out of different areas, in hopes to conduct a moment of self reflection, losing a sense of what they are seeing and then finding it again. A crucial part of my paintings are the voids around the subjects. It is a conversation about what is visible but equally as important what is absent, prompting the viewer to consider how much of our identity is shaped by what we lack or have lost. Over the past few years I've been greatly attracted to worn, redundant and reworked surfaces because they preserve a memory, contemplation of these surfaces is not only nostalgia but remains open to unknown futures. Starting points in my paintings would be palettes, old surfaces and paintings which I would sand back and turps down, rotating these and working more until the image from my subconscious started to present itself.