Making art allows me to explore a long-held fascination with the curious and uncanny in our everyday lives – when the familiar becomes unfamiliar, when we look and are looked at, speculation, suggestion and second guessing – and how all of this is experienced, recorded and recalled.
My work takes cues from ideas of presence and absence, invasion and evasion, surveillance, identity, intimacy and desire; how we inhabit our public and private lives, negotiate the spaces and places we find ourselves in and make sense of ever-shifting conditions.
I am also interested in how technology extends and complicates what we experience and how we connect – the permanence and impermanence of on-screen imagery, the tension between what is seen and what is perceived and how online and real-life worlds intertwine. Scrolling, swiping and streaming the constant flow of digital information often leads to delights that catch the eye – snatched glimpses, fleeting moments and constant flux that leave their mark.
Memory is also a recurring influence in my practice, with technology often reigniting thoughts, conversations and sensations from the past, bringing them unexpectedly into the present. Further direction comes from what remains once a moment has passed - what lingers, what has been lost and what might be waiting in the space between evidence and invention.
Figurative work presents characters, personas and alter-egos in transient encounters, sticky situations and playful reverie that prompt further narratives and interpretations to emerge. Abstract work takes further cues from the human body and its environment, as line and colour mark, stain, clash and confront their space.
An award-winning, cross-disciplinary artist, my practice incorporates drawing, painting, collage, embroidery, photography, video, sound, sculpture, installation, book arts and performance. I am currently exploring papermaking as way of to create site-responsive material that connects image, object and space.
To date, my work has been exhibited across the UK and around the world is held in public and private collections in the UK, Malta, the Netherlands, the USA, Canada and Australia.
I am also a qualified art tutor and have been teaching since 2011. I am the founder and managing director of The Fine Art Room – a UK-based art school offering weekly courses online, across London and abroad. I enjoy teaching art classes to students of all ages and encouraging them to develop their own ideas and practice.