"Your Place is Empty (series, five)", 2006

This quote creates a context for the paintings that form my body of work, 'Your Place is Empty', and which are derived from a handful of slides that for me, are the only connection with my past. Through working with these images, I have tried to make sense of my personal history in relation to these images and explore how this history is defined and reformed through the process of painting.

My interest lies in creating images that evoke a real or imagined past, and the way in which these acknowledge the irreversible and terminal nature of time. This episode from my family history has been preserved through photography, but the chemical reaction that fixed this moment has inexorably contributed to the deterioration and decay of the source material. The act of painting from these slides is a futile attempt to preserve the moment, to make permanent that which was transient and fleeting.