I am a British artist currently working out of my home studio in Wiltshire. I spent my childhood travelling between the UK and locations such as South Korea, Indonesia and Hong Kong as a result of my father’s job and as a result I have embraced a life of intentional rootlessness. This sense of not wishing to be confined to a particular place or a slave to a routine deeply permeates my work as a painter, the large canvases present fractured, abstracted landscapes populated with biomorphic forms and biological references that all speak of mortality, predation and a kind of reckless freedom.
The natural world looms large in my work, the horror and the wonder of nature, the grotesque alongside the beautiful, the fecund and the parasitic and above all the flesh. Avoiding the figurative and representational, I have carved out a space to work in that allows me to continuously experiment and explore the fundamental dilemmas and absurdity of life without falling prey to easy repetition, always pushing my practice forward and working outside my comfort zone as a matter of course. With little pre-planning, the work is a genuinely organic process, adding layers, changing direction mid way through, never sure where a work is headed until it is finished. Currently working largely with acrylics, oil sticks and pastels on canvas I build layers then rub the paint back to varying levels of translucency to reveal hints of activity underneath the main image. Nothing is quite as it seems in these densely filled spaces, one thing threatening to overwhelm, familiar yet disembodied elements amidst the strange or slightly uncanny.
My previous career as a music photographer informs my practice in ways i had not foreseen, not just in how crucial a soundtrack is whilst I am painting, but also in some of the motifs, the theatrics, the aesthetics of the heavy rock/metal scene - these still permeate my choices. There is a boldness and a darkness to my paintings which definitely taps my experiences in the photo pit witnessing the spectacle of a live performance, I want the work to produce a similar sense of sensory overload and apprehension.
Most importantly, my practice is charged with a sort of of existential urgency, I can feel it in every work and around me in the studio and it moves me from one painting on to the next with its intensity.
Inspiration comes from many sources, but in particular the work of David Lynch, David Cronenberg, Francis Bacon, HR Giger, Philip Guston, Basquiat and Adrian Ghenie as well as constantly sourcing the early natural history documentaries of David Attenborough.