Babel
Oil on canvas
180x160cm
2024
A painting made from a collage of scraps of imagery assembled in a heap, like a pile of rubbish or an island, depicted in a dark and empty landscape. This motif was first formed when I began to use the paper cuttings left over after making my other, more traditional collages. The bits of the images I had found interesting had been removed, leaving abstract and strange patterns and textures that looked like recognisable things at first, but became stranger and more alien the longer you looked at them. Art critic Giuseppe Marasco described them as images with the punctum removed. I organised the scraps into a pile as if they had built up organically as they were discarded. The piles of offcuts signify the waste of consumer society and the attention economy, which strips culture of its dopamine-rich treats and pumps it straight to our brains, leaving the chaff behind. To combat the speed and throwaway culture of modern media, I slowly and faithfully painted the collage, slowing down and absorbing the waste imagery, devoting time and concentration to the unwanted victims of ruthless optimisation in late-stage capitalism and the internet generation. The junk in the piles can also be read as the masses of waste produced each year and dumped in the sea or in a landfill site, where it will remain for thousands of years.
Details:
Heap
Oil on canvas
180x160cm
2024
Another scrap heap painting, made via the same process of collage, this painting depicts a pile of abstracted forms and glimpses of figuration. Arranged as if the elements in my earlier collage paintings had collapsed into a heap, this painting symbolises the aftermath of a society bombarded with imagery via advertising, social media and 24-hour news cycles. The image has been cheapened via saturation in the 21st century. What does this mean for painters? How do we compete in such a world? What does it mean to add yet more images into such a storm? Fatigued with imagery, I have naturally found myself painting a heap of discarded shards. The pile for me is a poignant symbol, one that naturally forms with neglect, a way of sorting mess, and one that describes humanity’s excess of production and waste. In a world filled with trash leftover from the last 100 years of “progress”, my generation and those that follow are left with the burden of sorting through the mess, extracting useful ideas and sound ideologies for recycling and finding a way to safely dispose of the toxic ones. The heap describes other burdens too: perhaps emotional baggage or psychological weight? As usual, the image formed first, and these thoughts after, making this painting allowed me to reflect on this topic and explore the stimulating techniques that can be used to paint so many varying textures and languages.
Details:
Debris
Oil on canvas
190x130cm
The second in a series of ‘heap’ paintings based on collages made from the discarded pieces of paper that are left after I have cut out the interesting figures and objects I use for my usual collages. I have been piling the scraps up into heaps to symbolise a weightiness. For me, the act of using waste to create is poignant in the midst of a climate crisis, but the forms that are made have an emotional, less rational feel to them as well. Whether that be a visualisation of “emotional baggage” or the feeling of being trapped by your possessions. The pile also speaks of wreckage, decay, archaeology and architecture.
Rubble
Oil on canvas
190x130cm
The first in a series of ‘heap’ paintings based on collages made from the discarded paper clippings.
EXTRATERRITORIAL_ABDUCTION
Oil on canvas
128x99cm
The largest and newest painting in my aerial thermometry series. I’ve been painting from thermal images and aerial photos, and looking at other forms of surveillance technology used in scientific and military applications. Where the first six paintings were small and each focused on a single image, this work features multiple images arranged across the surface. I have long been interested in “picture in picture” compositions in painting, having used the motif multiple times, and I keep returning to it. This type of composition seems relevant in an era so dominated by an array of screens with simultaneous displays. I have been drawn to the aesthetics of technology, including scientific and military, since I was a child. I used to draw detailed maps and battle scenes full of machinery and high-tech weapons as early as age 5. I have returned to this kind of visual language as an adult, where it has met my interest in politics and anthropology. I have been adapting imagery of landscapes, machines, medical science and archaeology to interrogate my beliefs and understanding of the world. The imagery in this painting references volcanic activity, military aircraft and airbases, thermometry, and space travel. It resembles the kind of multi-display screens in science fiction or a pinboard used by conspiracy theorists.
Details:
Aerial Thermometry series
Oil on canvas
Various sizes
Divine Masculine Divine Feminine – Triptych
Oil, acrylic, calico and collage on canvas
190x480cm (full) 190x160cm (individually)
A spiritual sister to my earlier triptych “Relief”.
Started at the beginning of lockdown and put on hold due to the impracticality of its size and the loss of access to a studio, the work was completed between October 2022 and January 2023.
The canvas has been built up with collage and elements painted from second hand imagery selected for its blatant consumerist propaganda. The aspirational is paired with images of violence and perversion, with the intention of questioning the capitalist system, gender roles under patriarchy and the destruction of the environment. An apocalyptic feeling pervades the work, a reflection of the feeling amongst young people today when faced with the prospect of the future. The imagery bombards the viewer the way we are now bombarded with imagery via social media, the internet and advertising. The visual language constantly changes across the piece, echoing the disparate formats of imagery we are faced with every day. The work explores themes of masculinity and femininity; aspects created socially and present physiologically. It explores psychoanalytic ideas of gender, the phallus and the sex/death drive as well as Batailles’ theories of limit experiences and eroticism. It is a personal exploration of my psyche and my interactions with and understanding of men and women in my life.
Can also be displayed as a diptych, titled Gang Stalkers as shown below:
Details:
Relief – Triptych
Oil, acrylic, calico and collage on canvas
190x480cm (full) 190x160cm (individually)
Individual Titles (left to right):
Relational Entanglement
Post-Mortem
As Above, So Below
This is the first oil painting made with a process of not planning, but cutting out shapes of painted calico and glueing them onto the canvas, then glueing paper on top, then painting individual figures or scenes one by one as I came across them in my box of collage clippings. The spontaneity of this process helped me avoid the preplanning that often leads to a composition of horizontals and verticals that felt quite awkward. Prior to this, I had been making collages with this process but not paintings, and there was a disconnect between the two that needed addressing.
The imagery makes subtle references to issues I think about a lot and am interested in, such as anxieties of modern living, the impact of technology, psychoanalysis and layers of consciousness, how governments deal with crises like health scares (this was prior to covid19), death, religion, the paranormal, violence, and conspiracy theories. There are a lot of ideas going on in it, as there are lots of thoughts and interests going on in my mind, and I think this reflects how my generation feels: bombarded with information, all very dramatic and all contradicting each other.
My research into conspiracy theories forms a large source of inspiration for this work; however, there are bigger messages being put across in this work, and if there were one overarching theme, it would be the influence of the internet. For most young people and many older people, it is the main source of information, but a place that is at war with itself constantly and is full of false information that masquerades as the truth. Websites also rely on clicks to get revenue, so the internet is full of dramatic and intense content, sexual, violent and inflammatory. This kind of imagery fills your head when you spend enough time on the internet, and the paintings are a result of that.
I am always acutely aware that painting is an ancient medium, and I often wonder about its relevance in a digital society and question why I still paint, so subverting the traditions of painting (whether formally or via the imagery I depict) is a way for me to explore that.
This piece also explores space and depth. Another conversation about the relevance of painting was the Greenbergian argument for abstraction to embrace the flatness of painting and do away with illusionistic depth. I was very interested in the Jasper Johns Bathtub series of paintings of a real 3d space, but seen with a head-on view of a flat wall with flat posters on it and then right in the middle an illusionistic nail protruding from the wall with a shadow, he was playing both games, flatness and depth. This painting collages areas of depth and areas of flatness; they overlap and intersect in ways that don’t make sense in a consistent way, and there is a mix of different spaces. This is where the name Relief comes from, it’s partly a comment on relief sculpture, which is both three-dimensional and flat, and partly a sarcastic use of a word that is opposite to the feeling we experienced when faced with any of the topics in the painting.
Chapel of Rest
Oil and acrylic on canvas
150x100cm
Continuing with a common motif of mine: the picture-in-picture effect, this painting features an image that is interlaid with two ‘windows’ offering different images to the main image that fills the majority of the canvas. The painting was initially inspired by Victorian era Christmas cards depicting dead birds, sent to loved ones with a sense of dark humour. The dark humour was continued in the choice of imagery used: in most cases, it would make sense to overlay something as tragic and sullen as a ravaged battlefield with something offering more hope; however, in this case, I decided to overlay it with images of yet more melancholy. The painting doesn’t just exist as a source of humour, however, as it is painted with sensitivity and aims to be absorbed on multiple levels. The industrial slaughter of young men during the First World War marked a shift in the way global power operated and its use of modern technology. The Victorians were morbid people and noted for their contribution to the gothic genre, and the First World War left a shadow over generations of artists who lived through it, creating swathes of artwork that grappled with death and destruction.
Baldur & the Sword
Oil and acrylic on canvas
150x100cm
A painting of an English Bull Terrier named Baldur, a real dog belonging to a good friend, who is seen here grasping a mythical sword with his mouth. The painting is based on a photo of him biting a plastic toy sword, with the sword being sized up and replaced with a real one in the painting process. The image was chosen for its striking quality, the initial reaction to it being concern for the dog, with the knowledge that a sword is very sharp and a dog’s mouth very soft. The image was also chosen for its seemingly symbolic qualities. It resembles the kind of image seen in medieval art, in the illustrations of alchemy books, or perhaps the cryptic symbols of the Freemasons. The piece sits among a series of paintings exploring the Gothic genre and its relevance in the contemporary world. The feeling is that this image could be an archetype, representing something much larger and perhaps quite mystical. To some, however, this painting might not function as a mysterious, elevated concept, but can simply be enjoyed as a playful celebration of the high fantasy genre, and both reactions are equally valid.
Utopia
Oil on canvas
101.5×50.5cm
Another in my series of green paintings. Similar to “Evil Lurks”, this one also features a landscape invented by collaging images of separate locations. However, in this painting, the torn edges of the paper collage pieces and the joins between them are included, providing what looks like cracks in the otherwise idyllic scene. There is a continuity between each image, which presents as one landscape, but the jumping in colour and shape leaves the scene disjointed and fractured. A theme that can be gleaned from this piece is that of the climate crisis, history’s biggest threat to the utopian view of natural beauty. The cracks appearing in the landscape insinuate the beginning of a collapse. But the idea that remained with me whilst making the piece was of the dark underside of nature, which is omnipresent and inseparable from the utopian aspects of nature. The idea of evil and good as two sides of the same coin, the balance of chaos and order, light and dark and other readings of duality in philosophy and religion. The idea that nature contains an element of evil in its beauty is part of Gothic and romantic fiction and art, a core theme of all my explorations.
Evil Lurks
Oil, acrylic, paint pen and spray paint on canvas.
Another painting in the greenery series. The motif painted on top of the landscape resembles patterns more often seen in tattooing, a kind of contemporary reworking of the 90s (now infamous) tribal designs (for want of a better term), which has come to be known as “cybersigilism”, a visual style that has really taken off in tattooing the past few years. But it is also inspired by the towers and details on gothic churches, the angular and sharp shapes on the buildings and armour of the evil characters in Lord of the Rings, and the concrete spikes used to demarcate areas where radioactive waste is buried: the attempt of architects to use a visual language of evil and danger to warn potential intelligent life thousands of years in the future to steer clear. I’m interested in how these sharp and angular curves are read as malicious and non-human across many cultures and throughout history. I felt that laying this visual over a landscape would imply a mysterious evil within an otherwise twee and idyllic depiction of nature. The landscape is by default non-descript as it was painted from a collage of different landscapes from all over the world, but it seems to lend itself to the rugged beauty of Scandinavian landscapes, invoking the strange pagan practices that continue in some regions to this day, originally condemned as black magic and satanic by the church.
The Big Theatre
Oil on canvas
100x100cm
Combining sources as diverse as traditional Japanese theatre costume, photojournalism from Africa, NASA’s Orion spacecraft and emerging health technologies. The multiple-image field of this painting uses juxtaposition to crash together ideas and narratives from vastly different areas of our world and urges the viewer to question what these images have in common and why they have been combined. With no specific narrative in mind, the images act as symbols or archetypes that represent all the different sociopolitical topics that bombard the public daily via various media.
Marxist Millionaires
Oil on Canvas
60x100cm
The title comes from a Sunday Times Magazine from the 1980s featuring a story about a handful of the top businessmen at the time of China’s first experiments with free market economics. The article was covering the beginning of the period in Chinese history where the government were pivoting from a planned economy to an international market in a way that would allow China to compete with the rest of the world, but allow the party to remain at the top. I liked the phrase as a wry oxymoron.
In part, this painting is about using the visual qualities of modern media in conjunction with traditional aspects of painting. This painting is made with the same materials as a Renaissance painting, but it couldn’t exist before the invention of the camera. This is another instance of subverting the traditions of oil painting via not just content but formal qualities, too.
This painting is also another attempt at achieving this idea of a window in the painting, a rectangular hole in the middle of a consistent background image. Having something as inorganic as a rectangle cutting through the surface of the painting talks about flatness and depth in the surface of a painting, something I remained preoccupied with.
A hole in the surface of an image of a space interrupts the illusion of depth, making it flat, but as it is a hole, it suggests there is something behind, so it creates another sense of depth, the image behind, but of course, this is also an illusion. Interrupting an illusion with an illusion is interesting to me conceptually, as it makes me think of tricks politicians play when they seemingly fix one issue by replacing it with another.
Missing
Oil on Canvas
60x60cm
This painting was made from a corrupted digital image file. I was interested to see what this would look like in paint. This is a continuation of my thinking about the subversion of oil painting via modern technology. There is a difference between this work and a collage painting like Marxist Millionaires, and that is the element of time. The collage paintings are built up in layers and take multiple days to complete. Marxist Millionaires had to be done in two stages. This painting was done in one go and took maybe an hour or two; it was very quick. The time element plays into what the paintings look like. The speed and the looseness, and the composition are all connected to time.
VHS Crowd
Oil on Canvas
60x60cm
This painting is another that talks about the influence of modern technology on the formal qualities of painting. This is a still from some grainy, very blurry footage of a crowd in a stadium, although I can’t be sure whether it’s a TV camera that uses film or a fan’s personal VHS camcorder, the effect is the same. A ‘poor image’ 1 that owes its colours, textures and therefore its atmosphere and mystery to the technology that recorded it. When this is converted into paint, more things happen, the context is taken away, and these accidental formal qualities (qualities often seen as negative and actively avoided by camera makers) become artistic decisions and are bestowed with more meaning. The softness of the image also lends itself to oil paint very well.
1. In Defense of the Poor Image – Hito Steyerl
The Monochrome Series
Acrylic and solvent ink on canvas
