The “internal rooms” depicted in my paintings are carved out of my imagination; they are basic, pared down, impermanent and often with doors or windows that hint at the possibility of an elsewhere. Water often appears, also acting as a kind of portal to another dimension, a deeper level of descent, inviting bathing or something more sinister. Water seen as a force for both life and death, here, it may have ingressed into the rooms as an ambiguous external element.
Figures in the paintings enact their private tensions of apathy and frenzy, comedy and despair. Not always whole, they materialise and dematerialise and exist in an indefinable time and place. Deleuze describes a Plane of Immanence, where the image is neither representation nor thing, but a process, a constant becoming, a perpetual inbetweenness – between text and image, past and present, sensation and matter. They wait, in a perpetual space in time, an impasse that seems to be following or preceding an event.
The 2025 postcard-sized self-portrait series came from a need to explore early aspects of self through the emotional unruliness of paint. The portraits cover all ages and feelings from childhood hurt to heedless play, they arrived unbidden like spirits. The portraits have led to more figurative work, enabling me to look at themes around power, agency and non-agency.
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