The work sits somewhere between the distant and the intimate. Notions of surface and depth, illusion and reality are explored both in a pictorial sense and in a wider philosophical sense. There is an engagement with the Renaissance concept of painting as a window on to another space, while an awareness exists of artists such as Rene Magritte and John Stezaker, who explore the idea of a window or screen in art as a metaphor for perception; a threshold between the interior and the exterior and a space for projection.
Sometimes an image is used as a point of departure, other times the subject is revealed through the process of making. Led by intuition images are gleaned from a wide variety of sources, sometimes originating from everyday ephemera other times referencing the art historical. During a process of transcription, the original information is manipulated. Sometimes the intervention made is subtle, other times the transformation is more drastic. The result retains an essence of its origin while hinting at something that transcends its source.
In all the work there is an interruption of some kind. Sometimes represented, other times it is actualised on the surface. In the works on paper, small marks punctuate the surface with an obsessive surgical precision, bringing to mind both the cosmic and the atomic, relating to ideas of the infinite or the microscopic. In other works the disruption may take the form of an absence, a void, a tear or an opening. The depicted intrusion or literal rupturing of the surface implies at a space beyond. Driven by an intense fascination in how things come into being, there is always a search for truth, clarity and for a greater understanding of what lies 'beneath the surface'. The rectangular ‘void’ that appears in several of the works takes its dimensions from modern technological devices such as the screens of an iPhone and a laptop. Thinking about how such devices used for communication ‘punctuate’ our lives, the negative space was used as a formal element to punctuate the composition. Artist references include Hiroshi Sugimoto, Miroslaw Balka, Kazimir Malevich and Mark Rothko. Whether the reference is to the bodily, or what is described resembles a screen, window, or door, the space created offers the potential for transitory movement and the viewer is enticed to enter.
