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.
