My work explores identity and emotion using surrogate creatures and figures. Many are hybrids that sit somewhere between reality and fantasy, not quite animals not quite humans forms that inhabit a world that can be light and comforting, expressing love, trust, hope and joy. At other times the world can be dark and complex, where creatures become vessels to explore the emotional uncanny, unsettled states of mind that conjure feelings of fear, uncertainty, anxiety, shame and isolation.

I have always been interested in Mannerist figuration and depictions of landscape in Western Art History. I enjoy working with subjects that lean towards sentimentality and idealism. As a child Leonardo da Vinci and Gainsborough were as inspiring to me as children’s TV. I try to make space in the work to raise questions about different versions of reality. The work often explores feelings and experience through storytelling and the act of painting itself.

My work is made using oil paint on primed linen or canvas on wooden stretchers, boards and sometimes on paper. I like to draw and use a variety of mediums, pastel, pencil, charcoal and watercolours. Many painting techniques I like are derived from Western European painters from the Northern Renaissance through to the Baroque. I sometimes use a coloured ground and techniques including grisaille underpainting, scumbling and glazing. When I use glazing I build up the surface of the work to create colours that can only happen when one colour is applied on top of another. Sometimes I work alla prima wet on wet, and concentrate on the immediacy and energy of gesture. Here I push and pull the subject matter back and forth between figuration and painterly abstraction, working with colour and spatial relationships to disrupt recognition by displacement and disintegration.