Updated Artist Statement

I have updated my Artist Statement with new reflections and ideas that are becoming more cemented.

Artist Statement

My painting is a visual journey back and forth between internal and external landscapes. I am drawn to the natural landscape - not the topographical elements, or ‘views’ in a moment of time, but rather the wider experience of belonging and loss within a place. My artistic language and internal landscapes are derived from culturally borrowed decorative objects of my childhood in Hong Kong where Chinese antiques as well as Indonesian and Japanese indigo dyed textiles formed the visual world that I grew up in. My external landscapes are the rural idyll of Wiltshire where I live: beautiful, eroding, fragile.

I see the natural world through the lens of this oscillation, a memorialisation of belonging and loss; a type of visual archaeology where memories are embedded in layers of paint and intuitive mark making. Ecological chaos and ruination have become the context of my landscapes and I see these symbols of remembrance, personal ancestry and collective grief in my surroundings as expressions of my own internal and external landscapes.

I work on canvas, wood and paper and handle my materials roughly and very physically, working in many thick and thin layers that are then scrubbed, sanded, scorched and scraped back and then harmonised to reveal an analogous history of the layers of time, experience and memories. I am interested in the visual language of ruination and grief where beauty and devastation become entangled, creating imagery that refers simultaneously to antiquity and the contemporary.