ArtCan Crossing the Liminal at
Hampstead Garden Gallery

“Now more than ever the connections we have with the places and spaces we live in are some of the most important. Whether you’re disconnected from the places you love or are discovering new places near where you live and appreciating it in a wholly new way, the outdoors has offered us an escape from the realities of life in a pandemic. As our relationship with these places evolves we find something new in them. Crossing the liminal seeks to explore these new connections, memories of old and the transition between the two.” Lucy Pickford, Curator

26th June - 10th July 2021

“When I saw this brief it immediately struck a chord with me and with what my artwork is about and has been about for many years.

“My painting has always occupied that space between figurative and abstracted, between representational and imagined, between real landscapes in my day-to-day, and memories of landscapes in my past. The portrayal of the trees I meet out and about on my walks around South London has become one of the main foundations of my current practice, pulling together ideas of the day to day, of the experience of lockdown in Greater London, of the ‘normality’ of trees, even in urban areas, alongside the contrasting ideas of trees as icons of the natural world, ageless and aged. They are ordinary and extraordinary.”

The dictionary definition of ‘liminal’ taps into the core basis of what painting is about for me. The description of liminal as ‘occupying a position at or on both sides of a boundary or threshold’ kind of put into words for me something I have been trying to pin down in many an artist statement recently! I am not trying to replicate faithfully what is in front of me, but at the same time I am not wanting to create purely abstract work. I want there to be a chord of familiarity, of connection, of emotion when a viewer looks at my work, whilst simultaneously they can appreciate the more abstract effect of the application of paint and water on a surface in and of itself. I want to create a sense of space and depth and perspective in my work, but also bring people back to the pleasure of getting eyeball-close to what paint can do on a two dimensional surface.”