My Process

My practice is rooted in both the language and aesthetics of storytelling and in the surreal tradition of the interpretation of dream images. Informed by my background as a poet and lover of literature and critical theory, I treat the painting as a visual poem that uses space, presence, absence, rhythm, and texture to create links that open up rather than foreclose meaning. In this way the work invites viewership as active participation and reflection on the role of meaning-making as both ritual practice and as a tool for navigating our multi-polar world. 

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I am fascinated by the field of semiotics (the study of ‘signs’ and symbols as building blocks to meaning) and it figures as my primary concern when approaching composition. My works tend to combine elements of symbolism, surrealism, and expressive figuration to insist that we reflect on how personal and social experience shapes our interpretations of the visual-narrative world, both on the canvas and around us. 

Thematically, the work is iterative, always concerning itself with my obsessions, namely, ‘mythmaking’, and the interplay between physical embodiment and unconscious immaterialism. This can take the form of recontextualising Hellenistic stories to create uncanny parables about the modern world, while seeking to foreground how objects and experiences move and exist across psychical and physical realms. In a sense, this combination allows me to combine elements of social psychoanalysis with anthropology and comparative theory to examine how social systems create human pathology, and in doing so maybe even diagnose some of those pathologies that we may not know that we have. Again, it’s the meanings we draw that are telling, for me.

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A motif I often return to, like  many artists, is the figure. In my work, it is a dynamic metaphor for the human drive toward meaning-making. Skin can be a smooth mirror to the viewer, or else thick and abraded, adapting to the labour of excavating meaning, which takes a toll on the individual - often reflected in the chastised anatomies of my figures. These figures are collaged, often part real world referent, part concept, and often taken from images I have dreamt, or - when I am particularly lucky - fully-formed paintings that have presented themselves to me in the strange narrative of a real dream.

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Beyond the conceptual space of the surface, I am also keen in grounding my practice, materially, in the real ‘stuff’ of the work. I try my best to disturb the flatness of the painting with modelling paste, grain mediums, and even bone dust and charcoal mixed into my paint to emphasise the reality of the physical object in space, and the tension that draping my ideas across its surface creates.