Statement

I am a painter, printmaker and object maker and my research interests are practiced based and interdisciplinary in that I have chosen to interconnect the different areas of my practice making prints to form into 3d objects from which to paint. I am interested in the language of representation and how when we look at visual images our impression of them is filtered through our internal memory banks of countless other images. When we see a rough and ready version of a thing by a non-artist, a child, a modest improviser or an outsider artist, a space for the imagination opens up between the real object and its representation and that is where I situate my paintings. Scare crows, snowmen, dolls, models, and the like share this potential and by playfully making my own versions I create subject matter to paint from. In 2008 I begun working with the materials collected for recycling, plastic cartons, tins and cardboard boxes. A cat food factory and a paint factory are two scenarios that have so far emerged from the mountain of junk.

In 2009 I made paper models of televisions forming them from prints taken from packaging and developing paintings from them. The interest in television as a subject stems from having given up watching television in 2004 and a nostalgia for the cathode-ray tube. Using the freedom to programme my own televisions, I have taken stills from an Arena film, ‘Searching for the wrong eyed Jesus’ which featured Pentecostal church services from the southern states of USA, imagined a channel for cat enthusiasts and designed test-cards for other emerging esoterically themed channels.