About

Artist Bio & Practice Statement I am a contemporary painter exploring the emergence of imagery from abstraction. Through intuitive layers of gesture, colour and form, flowers, bodies and erotic structures surface from visual uncertainty. Informed by natural systems of proportion and growth, the work explores recognition, desire, transformation and the tension between what is revealed and what remains hidden. My painting practice explores the moment when an image begins to emerge from uncertainty. I work intuitively, rarely beginning with a fixed subject, narrative or predetermined visual destination. Instead, paintings develop through an accumulation of marks, colour, gesture and form. Layers are built, obscured, disrupted and rediscovered. I respond to what begins to appear, allowing the painting to become a space of dialogue between intention and instinct, control and surrender, concealment and revelation. At the centre of my practice is the experience of recognition: the moment when something previously unformed suddenly becomes visible. A face may emerge from a field of marks; a bodily structure may reveal itself; a landscape, flower, aperture or erotic form may surface without having been consciously planned. I am interested in this threshold between abstraction and figuration, where an image can be both discovered and invented. The paintings are informed by natural systems of growth and proportion, particularly the Fibonacci sequence and principles associated with the golden ratio. I do not use these as formulas to reproduce, but as underlying ways of thinking about rhythm, balance and the relationship between the part and the whole. They provide a structural counterpoint to the spontaneity of gesture: a quiet order within which instinct can operate. Flowers have become a recurring presence within this language of emergence. I am interested less in the flower as botanical subject than in its act of opening. A flower contains and reveals; it moves from enclosure towards exposure. Within the paintings, it can become a body, an aperture, an eye, a mouth, an interior or a threshold. Its petals may become gestures or bodily forms, while its centre suggests an opening into something more intimate. This slippage between forms is important to the work. An image can remain a flower while becoming something else. A circular form can suggest an eye, an opening or a sexual structure. Vegetation can become flesh; abstraction can become anatomy. These shifts allow the paintings to occupy an unstable space between the recognisable and the unknown. An erotic dimension consequently runs through the work, often emerging indirectly through association rather than explicit representation. I understand this in relation to Eros not simply as sexuality, but as a force of attraction, vitality, embodiment and connection. Desire becomes a way of thinking about what draws us towards an image, what remains concealed within it, and what compels us to look again. The physical act of painting is fundamental to this process. Sweeping gestures, loops, drips, scratches, layers and interruptions create a visual field in which possibilities can develop. I am particularly attentive to moments when a mark appears to lead beyond conscious intention. Rather than treating these moments as accidents, I follow them, testing what the painting is asking to become. This does not mean relinquishing control. The work emerges through a continual negotiation between freedom and restraint, chance and structure. I create conditions for something to appear, then edit, obscure, uncover and refine what I find. The painting becomes a record of this exchange between what I intend and what I encounter. I think of painting as a form of listening. The image often seems to exist before I fully understand it, and my role is to remain attentive enough to recognise it when it surfaces. Meaning does not necessarily arrive at the moment of recognition; it can remain suspended, allowing several readings to coexist. Flower and body. Beauty and desire. Abstraction and recognition. Surface and interior. These are not oppositions to be resolved, but states that can occupy the same image. Ultimately, my paintings are concerned with transformation: something hidden becoming visible, something closed beginning to open, something unknown becoming momentarily recognisable. Yet revelation is never complete. Even when an image declares itself, something remains concealed within it. The painting remains open.