I’m a British artist working primarily with painting, drawing and textiles. My work explores the space between memory, circuitry and nature, and the patterns we create, inherit and live amongst.
I came to painting through an unexpected route. During lockdown, while renovating our home, I began working with a large blowtorch to scorch timber using the Japanese technique of shou sugi ban. I became fascinated by the physicality of the process, burning, marking, repeating and disrupting a surface. It changed the way I thought about making work and became the beginning of my current practice.
There is an overwhelming need in me to create pattern and then disrupt it. I build structures, rhythms and connections, then allow them to unravel. Wires, threads, pathways and organic forms repeatedly appear in my work, moving between things remembered and things observed.
Some of these visual memories go back to childhood. I remember the coloured electrical wires of televisions and radios opened up by my grandfather, an RAF engineer and electrician, and the sewing threads that surrounded my mother. More recently, the landscape and birdsong around my studio in Surrey have begun to enter the work.
I work intuitively, moving between acrylic on linen, drawing, scorched wood and embroidery. Digital drawings made on an iPad often become the starting point for paintings, while paintings can migrate into textiles and stitched works. I’m interested in what happens when an image changes material, scale or process, and when something carefully constructed is allowed to become uncertain.