Taking Care of It black gesso spray paint and oil crayon 80x110cm 2020 

The bird represents both survivor and sentinel species; from the small ground-dwelling birds that survived extinction events 66 million years ago to the canaries-in-mines, the bird is a symbol of hope and warning. The bird-like figure is a carer, rescuer or harbinger, a symbolic guide, carrying a small figure in a helmet or hazmat suit, fragile and barely there. The figure is drawn onto the canvas with spray, airborne paint that leaves traces on an uneven surface that has been patched together and sealed in parts with black gesso.

The White Knight is Talking Backwards: mixed media on canvas, 3 x [200x150cm] 2019,. Triptych [450x200cm]

- The Baby Jesus in a Hazmat Suit,

- The Bombardier is Telling a Story

- One Pill Makes you Larger and One Pill Makes you Small and the Ones that Mother Gives you Don’t Do Anything at All

The White Knight is Talking Backwards

The White Knight is Talking Backwards is suffused with sci-fi and dystopian imagery, surreal fairytale references, histories of war and the creaturely other. The canvases are populated by maternal figures, nurses, and carers tending to the sick. The Bombardier reads a story while the bones of atomic veterans glow in the dark and bird like creatures try to find ways to help.

The hybrid creatures and masked or augmented humans that appear in my work are a response to contemporary human life. Hal Foster* suggests that the creaturely makes its appearance in times of crisis, from the therianthropes etched onto cave walls by our ancient ancestors to the creatures found in post-war paintings, it is not a matter of where or how but of when such creatures appear and that such a time might also be now.

Painting is a slow resistance, a process of excavating the network of past experiences and present conditions to deal with the existential threats we face in a post-truth climate of ulterior facts, (mis)information and histories being re-written. My images play with the resemblance of things in order to create open narratives that are porous and contingent, darkly humorous and scripted with political intent. *Creaturely Cobra (2012)

On a Green Day, She Wears Her Felt Dress,

rabbit skin glue, gesso, oil paint and oil crayon on canvas 90 x 167 x 4cm, 2021

Autism is a neurodivergent condition that can have a massive impact on the way we are able to live our lives in high speed industrialised cultures. I experience the world through the prism of an Asperger’s brain, unable to filter things out the environment becomes an assault, overloading all the senses. Some days, when resilience is low, I just cannot go out. On a green day refers to colour as applied to an emotional state and as a connected form of patterning or dividing time, it refers to the down time required by many Aspie people to recover from the onslaught of previous days. The dress is significant because clothing suggests a shield and dress a form of camouflage or performative association with presenting the self. Felt is a material that is soft to the skin and sound absorbing so that it knocks back the abrasions of sound. This is essentially a self portrait brush in hand. Wanting to meld into the outside world but the world is so abrasive it is impossible. The felt dress is also a reference to Herland, to the Utopian possibilities of living lightly, in tune with nature and with each person living just as they are.

Catch 22 II,

oil on canvas [150x110cm] 2019

These two figures came from a doodle that suggested the character of Kenny in the cartoon series South Park, and Snowdon from Joseph Heller’s treatise on capitalism and the lunacy of war Catch 22 (1961). The phrase “catch 22” refers to the catch that is pivotal to the book; anyone who is crazy has to be grounded, but anyone who wants to get grounded, to avoid mortal combat, cannot be crazy, therefore cannot be grounded. “Catch 22” has since migrated to common usage and refers to a sticking point beyond which no rational solution can be made. The cartoon Kenny is destined to be re-incarnated despite his pointless suicides. Recurrence is implicit in both sources and reflects on attempts to find answers to impossible questions. Neither of the characters can make sense of their predicament.

Mother Earth & the Nasty Little Fucker

oil on canvas, 85cm x 110cm, 2019

In Mother Earth and the Nasty Little Fucker, a French beret becomes the Kaiser’s helmet, becomes a riding hat, becomes a toggled hat. All those traces of things that are buried underneath are still perceptible on the surface. The two characters represent the worst of humanity and the alterity of nature as humanity now sees it. The mother Earth figure simultaneously evokes the legendary drag performer Divine and Thing from Marvel comics. Arguably, both are considered monstrous but perhaps it is the ruff that is reminiscent of Elizabethan gentry that is truly monstrous. As with most of my current work, there is duplicity. Nothing is fixed. The paint plays with the resemblance of things so that the viewer is not required to read the picture but to remain open to it.

Waiting Room (The Artists)

acrylic on canvas [142x111cm] 2019

In Waiting Room formal lessons learned from Matisse about interior spaces, reverse lines and shifted perspectives are employed to create an imaginary and disrupted interior space. The characters that inhabit the space are combatants, static from boredom, or waiting for something apocalyptic to happen. The characters are like sharks kept in tanks, each break in the surface of the tank stutters with an invisible pulse detected only by the sharks, the seams repel and disrupt them.

The Inheritors: If Everyone Takes More than their Share...

charcoal, oil & spray paint on canvas, 2018

The fantastical hybrid creatures found in Palaeolithic cave art relate to figures in my recent paintings; semi-humans with interchangeable body parts, faces covered by creaturely masks or man-made augmentations. The creaturely and masking manifest in my work precisely because I believe our political systems have ruptured. The State’s power has again taken on catastrophic enmity toward its people with declared hostility towards; the other and alterity beyond its borders. The Inheritors points to a break-down in symbolic social order, making reference to the Renaissance as a marker of the birth of capitalism, the Weimar republic as a marker of excess and precursor to fascism, as well as the creaturely in the bird-headed figure.