My paintings offer an insight into the context of my life and identity, exploring a complex and subconscious landscape that reflects my colourful and lively upbringing. I draw inspiration from memories and images of beautiful places and landscapes I have experienced, such as seaside towns and the rolling Devon hills. Music fuels my creativity and by combining it with fluid paint, along with my own gestures and whole bodily movements, I create compositions through instinctive chance, finding forms through process and working to develop them once they appear.

Painting for me often feels like a performance, allowing an intuitive flow state to overcome me, enabling a place where I do not have to think. This somehow makes my ‘not thinking’ become ‘the thinking’. It’s the same ‘zone’ you need to be in to get something mundane completed, such as a household chore. When you aren’t overthinking things, you are just letting yourself be. My passion for improvised expression is enhanced from my love of music and dance that I have enjoyed throughout my life and my process aways seems to embody this.

For me, the painting process is like solving a puzzle, almost reflecting the rhythm and sounds of how a composition of music is pieced together. I want each of my paintings to be experienced as though you are listening to different songs, with layered sections of staccato brass or legato violin though repetition, colour and form, ensuring each painting is still part of the same playlist.

‘o4’ showcases a collection of works situated around this idea, combining the use of music with the use of everyday items such as sponges or squeegees and even a ruler to explore mark-making and forms. I enjoy discovering the outcomes of using an inanimate object that is usually used in a mundane roll and combining this with the performance of creativity.

I want my paintings to offer an escape for the viewer, somewhere to immerse themselves away from the pressing challenges of reality and for my colours and compositions to uplift their experience, providing a change from the concrete and digital landscapes we all live in.