I’m interested in what it means to be in our flesh — where the self begins and dissolves, and how we exist in relation to the world we find ourselves in. After a long period of physical illness, my work became rooted in the body, and develops in a negotiation between the body as subject and as maker.

My studio is a place of encounter and enquiry. I work on the floor and against the wall; horizontally the canvas becomes an impulsive bodily encounter, vertically it offers distance and reflection. Working on multiple pieces at the same time, sometimes painting with my fingers, my non-dominant hand and my eyes closed, I try to disrupt and disorientate myself out of habitual control, not to abandon intention, but to discover what’s below it. I destroy and erase with the hope of creating the conditions in which something else can emerge.

I’m interested in the threshold where control and intentional effort come up against impulsive, instinctive and accidental processes; the tensions that arise don’t just generate the work, they are the work. Colour, movement and surface textures are traces of a physical and emotional encounter with the material. This practice sits within a post-abstract-expressionist tradition, where process is a way of thinking, and making is an improvised collaborative encounter between body, image and material. 

For me the body is a way of knowing — a way of reaching for what I can’t describe.