I work across a wide range of approaches to painting and drawing. My practice is theoretically informed by the phenomenology of art, new materialism, and open ended processes. This is supported by an academic research platform that proceeds from philosophical phenomenology: Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and contemporary discussion around process and materiality. My current research focus is the ontology of the studio, and the development of work and practice that enacts a loosening of the traditionally self-centred intentionality of the artist/creator, affording agency to materials, studio and other situational events, and the studio as Heideggerian ‘project region’.
As for the work, I am content to wander the border between abstract and figurative, between narrative content and formal proposition, between image and mark, between illusion and paint. Many painters tend toward one of each extreme, in a logic of painting as object vs painting as a narrative vehicle. I am happy to remain a middle man, a safe place for painting to ‘bide its time’, tick over, and hope for something interesting to turn up… I work with and within those contradictions; they seem to resemble the same contradictions within experience itself. I work by one rule: A theme or narrative is a necessary fiction in order to get painting. Whatever a painting may be ‘about’, a painting for me is the performance of a certain way of doing things. From time to time that changes in and of itself…
Flavoured by a love-loathe existence inside the ‘circle of magic’ (Bourdieu) that is the art world today.
