Artist Statement

My work begins with observation, but is ultimately concerned with the instability of recognition: the moment at which visual information becomes an image, and an image becomes something we believe we know.

Working across painting, drawing and sculptural relief, I use the human body, landscape, objects and fragments of everyday life to examine how perception is constructed. Forms are reduced, interrupted, obscured or broken apart. A face may disappear while the body remains recognisable; a figure may exist only through a contour, a stain or a gesture; a landscape may move between physical place and autonomous fields of paint. I am interested in how little information is required for recognition to occur.

This incompleteness creates an active relationship between the work and the viewer. Where information is absent, perception begins to compensate. The viewer completes a body, reconstructs a space, assigns meaning to a gesture or projects an identity onto a figure whose identity has been withheld. Recognition becomes less an act of receiving an image than of producing one.

The body occupies a central position within this process. I often depict figures whose faces are turned away, obscured, fragmented or absent. Their physical presence remains legible while their individuality becomes inaccessible. The distinction between seeing a person and knowing them allows the figure to operate simultaneously as an observed body and as a site of projection.

Across different media, I approach representation as provisional rather than fixed. In drawing, a few lines and areas of colour can construct an entire physical presence. In painting, recognisable forms emerge from and recede into the materiality of the surface. In sculptural works, bodies, objects, architecture and fragments of narrative are physically separated and reassembled, making visible the discontinuous process through which perception produces coherence.

I am interested in the threshold before certainty: the point at which we recognise something before we fully understand what we are seeing.