The boundaries between reality and imagination play a large part in my approach to painting. I collate and connect memories, emotions and thoughts into a painted environment  or ‘scape’ that freely mixes the real and unreal.

 

Literary references along with seen and felt everyday experiences recorded through drawing influence my work, however the paintings do not always persist with the same reasons with which they began. The gestures and marks that I make through painting try to meet the words and text of things that I have read or written, each medium reaching out.  It is this shifting, improvised in between space that I am compelled to explore,  a universe where everything communicates freely with everything else.

 

Interests and influences include magical realism authors and lyrical writers such as Yasunari Kawabata as well as Japanese culture more broadly. Also the upland landscape of my home, negative space and shadows, folk lore and mythology. I enjoy modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath and contemporary poet Alice Oswald.

​

​