Artist’s statement
I make work about the lies that art and specifically painting tells us and the joy and interest that that can bring. I was trained as a scientist and am aware that much of reality refuses to be clearly defined, indeed this refusal becomes more complex the closer we look. Molecules become atoms, become particles, become waveforms and with each reduction in scale, certainty eludes us further and randomness triumphs. My own investigations in painting follow a similar pattern. Whether I am making work about clichés of masculinity, the value of art objects, or the role of the audience in art, as I peel away the layers, the distinctions and certainties crumble, leaving me with questions, rather than answers.
My current paintings are an attempt to work with that feeling, rather than to fight it, to be happy with the idea that randomness can create interest, intrigue and beauty. The ancient Greeks saw the Platonic solids as the building blocks of the universe, with limitless potential, but also charged with identity, symbolism and even gender. Taking Platonic solids as a starting point, I use acrylic paints to create impossible objects in and out of the picture plane. I like to bend the rules of composition and flaunt “taste”, creating false attachments, clashes of colour and paradoxical planes that playfully engage, whilst reminding the viewer that what they are seeing is paint, not reality. The objects might feel gendered, emotional, solid or flat, but my aim is that they will open up a dialogue between the work and the viewer which allows the viewer to ask questions of their own experiences of art, reality and truth.
Part of my interest is in the effect of the digital age on painting, both from a painter’s and the audience’s standpoint. Art in the age of digital reproduction can have a different relationship with the audience, with implications for the aura of the artwork and the potential for creating digital kitsch; a sense of melancholia inherent in the art object through only having encountered it digitally. But the interconnectedness of all things through the internet also brings liberation from the acknowledged models of art history, the atemporality of painting now allows all of art history to exist at once. I therefore see myself as an explorer of this new space without a fourth dimension, a traveller outside of time, sending back postcards of structures that obey different rules of nature and physics.
I make work about the lies that art and specifically painting tells us and the joy and interest that that can bring. I was trained as a scientist and am aware that much of reality refuses to be clearly defined, indeed this refusal becomes more complex the closer we look. Molecules become atoms, become particles, become waveforms and with each reduction in scale, certainty eludes us further and randomness triumphs. My own investigations in painting follow a similar pattern. Whether I am making work about clichés of masculinity, the value of art objects, or the role of the audience in art, as I peel away the layers, the distinctions and certainties crumble, leaving me with questions, rather than answers.
My current paintings are an attempt to work with that feeling, rather than to fight it, to be happy with the idea that randomness can create interest, intrigue and beauty. The ancient Greeks saw the Platonic solids as the building blocks of the universe, with limitless potential, but also charged with identity, symbolism and even gender. Taking Platonic solids as a starting point, I use acrylic paints to create impossible objects in and out of the picture plane. I like to bend the rules of composition and flaunt “taste”, creating false attachments, clashes of colour and paradoxical planes that playfully engage, whilst reminding the viewer that what they are seeing is paint, not reality. The objects might feel gendered, emotional, solid or flat, but my aim is that they will open up a dialogue between the work and the viewer which allows the viewer to ask questions of their own experiences of art, reality and truth.
Part of my interest is in the effect of the digital age on painting, both from a painter’s and the audience’s standpoint. Art in the age of digital reproduction can have a different relationship with the audience, with implications for the aura of the artwork and the potential for creating digital kitsch; a sense of melancholia inherent in the art object through only having encountered it digitally. But the interconnectedness of all things through the internet also brings liberation from the acknowledged models of art history, the atemporality of painting now allows all of art history to exist at once. I therefore see myself as an explorer of this new space without a fourth dimension, a traveller outside of time, sending back postcards of structures that obey different rules of nature and physics.
