My practice orbits around ideas of absence, separation and secrecy. These ideas stem from my early childhood experience of parental loss, and the subsequent emptiness left behind by something that once was. I sift through my past, unravelling vague memories and floating whispers of conversation to scatter throughout my paintings like breadcrumbs. Objects are replaced by projections of feelings, expressed through a lexicon of mark-making that encompasses pencil scribbles and scrawls of poetry alike. Words sit within the works, often dissolving in legibility and reduced to another form of mark-making. A conflict of my own creation arises in my decision to offload poetry onto canvas, only to cover it up again in a repeated process of inscription and erasure. I strive to explore the limits of vulnerability, embodied in the multitude of layers that lay beneath each painting’s surface. Taking place is an exchange between the seen and the unseen, and, more obliquely, the said and the unsaid.
