I am a Lancashire born/London based contemporary painter with a BA in Fine Art from Reading University 1996 and I am an alumni of the Turps Banana Art School on their Off Site Programme (2022-23).

My paintings explore responses to places that hold personal significance, rooting my practice in the recording of place, time, and personal memory. I am drawn to the resonance of specific locations and the unseen histories embedded within them. Taking a photograph marks the first act of recording, fixing a moment in time and space.

The paintings exist between the seen and the remembered, the physical and the emotional, offering reflections on how place and memory intertwine through the act of seeing and making. Through the visual interplay of opposites (fluid mark making versus the more formal, deliberate layer of white negative space, emotional colour responses versus reality, abstraction versus representation, foreground against background, expressive gesture layered with fine detail) each painting explores the tension between recognition and uncertainty in memories.

Colour plays a central role in construing meaning, emotion, and atmosphere, acting as a conduit for feeling. A viewer will bring their own perceptions and emotional associations to the painting, allowing colour and form to resonate differently for each individual. This reflects the deeply personal and neurological nature of our connections to place, how simply seeing or inhabiting a space can hold profound meaning for someone, even when that meaning remains unspoken.

I examine the origins, formation, development and growth of memories associated with place. How the first experience of a place is reinforced and changed by revisiting it. How memory of a place is impacted by other factors, who we were with, what we may have heard or discussed, weather and mood, essentially what our experience was on any given day. Which will differ from or be impacted by previous visits. Layer upon layer of experience impacts our personal memory.

In this way my work is a way of visually mapping my day to day experience, using locations associated with strong personal connection, or of places of emotional or historical significance. My paintings form an aide memoire, a record of places that come to mean something to me through the recording of memory.

From this point of origin, a specific location, my process becomes a gradual translation, from place to photograph, from photograph to painting, and ultimately toward abstraction. I am interested in how the eye and mind interpret visual information: how meaning, subject, and emotional resonance are located within a two-dimensional field. With each stage, the work moves further from representation, allowing ambiguity and suggestion to take precedence.