My practice uses the once-familiar locations of my Shropshire childhood (now distant/estranged both geographically and in time), as the basis for an investigation into landscape and Englishness, using drawing, painting and film. My work is informed by both historical and contemporary sources ranging from old postcards, slides, guidebooks and literary sources, to contemporary photographs taken by my parents or other family members at my request.
My practice also has a figurative element: I use the landscape, already loaded with personal remembrance, as a context within which to paint the situations of others. I paint teenage youths, placed and positioned in the landscape in order to discover, through painting, the territory that was once mine and is now theirs, their bravado and vulnerability playing out against the landscape that is shaping them.
Recent projects include a series of paintings and drawings based on images in John Piper and John Betjeman's Shropshire, A Shell Guide, from 1951 (Portfolio 1), and a series of drawings made via Google Streetview (Portfolio 2)
