Artist’s statement

Painting and drawing serve as modes of enquiry in my practice. Rather than presenting a fixed image or narrative, these artworks function as active surfaces through which image and meaning emerge in dialogue with the viewer. My painting practice is concerned with forms of knowledge that exist beyond what can be fully articulated or consciously known and painting becomes a way of approaching the unknown without reducing it down.

I am interested in tacit knowledge and the space between perception and language, where an image can register something that exceeds language. To activate these ideas I use a slow method of painting where the image emerges through layering and revision, producing ambiguous surfaces that reward sustained looking. Removing objective references allows me to rely on painterly intuition, where gradations of hue and value replace descriptive detail. This process leads to the steady and methodical application of paint, balancing opacity and transparency. The resulting surface carries an impenetrable, symbolic quality and the reduction of tonal contrast requires the viewer to slow down and engage their visual senses. I am particularly interested in the limits of perception and in the possibility that what we perceive is only a partial encounter with what is present. Rather than resolving this uncertainty, my paintings dwell within it. They function as sites where recognition and unknowability can exist simultaneously.

My research into magical philosophy has become a way of thinking through these questions. Magic proposes forms of knowledge that do not conform neatly to rational models: intuition, correspondence, symbolism, ritual and divination and the idea that images can have agency. This has led me to reconsider the status of the painted image as something that might be operative and invoke forms of knowing that exceed language.

The paintings do not seek to provide answers to these questions. Instead, they hold unresolved intellectual and philosophical possibilities in visual form, inviting a slower kind of attention in which meaning emerges through perception and intuition rather than explanation.