My work is concerned with two key elements – Images and Objects.
I am fascinated by what an image is, how we respond to them, how we construct and make them – whether built up of paint, silver salt or pixels. I am also intrigued by how each era has been obsessed with images. I believe all images have abstract values and all abstract images are steeped in reality.
Objects hold power over us, we covet them, we associate memories with them, consume and discard them. Found objects from other eras fill our museums and we piece together our understanding of these societies by their lost and reclaimed objects.
My work is based on these two fundamental elements. I collect and record the objects from our modern world – a scrap of cardboard, a plastic fragment – an object lost and found. These things, out of context, become strange and familiar. I find these objects on the street, on waste grounds, car parks - places that ‘Silt up with the litter of the living’. I then take the objects and try and interpret them as a two-dimensional image through a variety of approaches – orthographic projection, drawing, a photogram, a collagraph – any trick to convert the three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional image. I then reconstruct the image out of, none artistic material – found materials, wax, cardboard boxes, nails roof tiles – anything I come across. This echoes Rauschenberg’s belief that ’painting is more like the real world if it’s made out of the real world’.
Using non-conventional materials forces problems - for example glue oozing from crevasse or nails protruding from the surface. These Paintings share characteristics with sculpture where you can see how the work is constructed – there is a reaction between materials.
I impose my own limitations including only basing my work on found objects, using non artistic materials and working in a sequence. Limitations open you up to new approaches and creative solutions you wouldn’t explore otherwise. I work on wood which allows the surface to be attacked and the paintings reveal how they were constructed. The final object is not only an image - it is a physical thing.
My work is always based on this one idea and I keep doing it. If you pull at a single thread the world unravels.