Paintings combine many elements pulled from life and our imagination by the small tails they leave behind in our mind. They are things we can’t forget, it is an obsession, and a discovery for what it might mean or where its presence overlaps with our personal values. You may not fully understand why something interests you, so you search for it, and this is where I find my inspiration. For me, the process and the journey are the reason to keep creating and make new work. Drawing in its essence, both dry and painterly, embodies process – noticing thoughts and feelings and putting them to paper. It is less of a decision and more instinctual movement. I simply enjoy the act of doing; playing with shapes, flattening and stretching, arranging, sorting, and distorting images. Finding marks or forms which react nicely with a surface. These are all things which repeatedly feed into my paintings.

My smaller works are predominantly made using found wood and other discarded materials, so surface takes on a whole new significance. An object which has been intensely used, worn, fixed, and abandoned bears evidence of its past life and can only become more beautiful as time passes. I enjoy reacting to these marks with the intention of complementing, not merely to conceal them. I believe in tactility and rejecting boldness in favour of subtlety, thoughts which are reflected also in my recent sculptural and functional pieces. I have begun to use a method of covering up, revealing hints of the layer beneath. Painting the negative space allows me to completely block out some areas, whilst slowly carving away a delicate image in others. This has come about through looking at and collecting photographs of graffiti, specifically a term called buffing where patches of light colour are painted over unwanted tags. I find them mesmerising, and my larger paintings in this show pay homage to the naivety of such street marks.