Artist Statement
Spending a childhood in the pastoral environs of the countryside, I secured a respect for the machinations and unpredictability of nature. In particular, an admiration for the level of microscopic activity, feeding into the landscape at large.
Today, we consider nature in terms of its ecological influence, integral dynamism and recently its’ agency as non-human forces. Cyclic systems that for the most part follow seasonality but that randomly include anomalies.
Quite unintentionally, I found a desire to expose my working process to an element of randomness. Fraternising with a non-human force. Enhancing the possibility of anomalies with an undetermined outcome.
And so gravity and water quietly evolved as the elements and features in a majority of my working practices.
At other times randomness is brought to the process by including theoretical parameters, exceptions or oddities.
The Process
Applications of fluid layers are best conducted at ground level. This involves a considerable amount of water whose energy and gravitational pooling I attempt to harness, tirelessly working in opposition to the liquid’s determination to travel unfettered, either by stealth or haste, off the painting surface.
In practice this part of the activity can take hours of observation, manipulation and intuition. In truth, it is an unsettling experience as I have little, to no control on the unfolding experiment and there is no ‘read’ on the works progress. The only skill I can employ is in reducing the number of options that may cause failure. And yet failure kindly finds options to ensure its own success.
Conversely, once the suspension has been lulled into a semi occupation of the canvas, notably, it is not at rest. Instead, slowly evolving along several transient formations before evaporation solidifies its ‘settling’. A visually appealing outcome captures the patterned deposits of coloured pigment… an archive of flux or flow.
Methodology underpins the intuitive element of my creative process. Inter played with a set of random actions initiating an unpredictable hybrid result.
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B.A. Fine Art graduate, University of Ulster, Belfast and UAL, London.
My work has sold internationally and is included in private, public and corporate collections.