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My painting practice comes from a deep love and respect for wild, elemental places. They invoke both a sense of freedom and of belonging that forever calls me to the forest; to the mountains; to the sea. It's that untameable, indomitable spirit that I find so enthralling...
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...the wildness of it all.
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"Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree, if mankind perished utterly; and Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, would scarcely know that we were gone."
- Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)
...Even in human environments, I search for lichen on crumbling walls, or grasses erupting through concrete - any sign of nature punching its way through that thin veneer we call civilisation. These little rebellions are far more beautiful to me than any polished surface or clean, white space. It makes me wonder about how a wall, or a street, or an entire city would look and feel after us - when human rule has fallen. Paint peels where ivy grows; damp rises through rotting floorboards; and trees burst through the tumbledown rooftops of buildings that once echoed with human life. Eventually, all things are returned to the earth. It’s incredibly poignant yet somehow remarkably beautiful. One way or another, nature reclaims what was once its own and retires all else to memory. We have always known this, but we have grown to imagine ourselves as somehow separate from nature. We quantify wilderness based upon it’s worth to us - and if it isn’t useful, convenient or lucrative, we put great effort into controlling or eliminating it. I seek a different philosophy in my painting.
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'Ash, volcanic dust, oxidised metal, salt - these are all symbols of destruction and loss, of that great fall we collectively fear. They are the remnants of violent, devastating events - but also represent a greater renewal process.'
A primal relationship with nature feeds into my work through an alchemical painting language that focuses on the symbolism of material and the transformative effects of the elements. I see beauty in imperfect, wild things - in unkempt plant life and mossy rocks, in weeds and ashes and embers and all the things we try to contain, or remove, or obscure. I consider the alchemy of material alongside its assigned symbolic associations, combining these perspectives in experimental ways that visualise time, ecology and the collective unconscious - as well as the impact of human presence or absence.
Climate change is an undeniable factor in all of this. We are, each one of us, living on the brink of the world's next mass extinction event. Ash, volcanic dust, oxidised metal, salt - these are all symbols of destruction and loss, of that great fall we collectively fear. They are the remnants of violent, devastating events - but also represent a greater renewal process.
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Fire destroys, but it also purifies... -
...ash chokes the earth but nourishes the soil...
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...salt protects and preserves, but can also be deadly.
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The balance of nature shifts constantly between decay and regeneration, and my approach to painting swings on that same pendulum - it’s a fluid process where earth, air, fire, water and ice play active roles. Marks and textures are built up organically; pigment is layered in splashes, daubs and washes; and marks are scorched, scratched and ground into the surface of the canvas. It’s quite a feral approach to painting that reflects the rawness of the materials used, and that inherent need for wildness. The resulting interactions, both material and symbolic, are in themselves a transformation - a kind of alchemy.
