‘What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, hear more and feel more.’

Susan Sontag                                                                                                                                                                                                                      Against Interpretation, 1964

In today’s overstimulating digital age, it is becoming increasingly difficult to remain fully present to the people and places we engage with. Modern technologies – in particular our mobile phone’s endless demands for attention – make it ever more challenging for us to experience the everyday without at least one of our senses being compromised by multi-tasking, whether that be listening to podcasts whilst sitting in a birdsong-filled park, watching YouTube cooking videos whilst our partner makes us dinner, or texting a friend whilst walking through crisp autumn leaves. Such moments of strong sensory stimulus quickly lose their richness when we fail to give full awareness to our body’s processing of them. If we are to develop a deeper understanding of the world we inhabit, we must, as Susan Sontag observes, become re-acquainted with our bodily senses of sight, sound, touch, taste and smell.

I am interested in how a painterly play between the formal qualities of abstraction, such as colour, shape and gesture, and the specificity found in figurative forms can translate everyday experiences into visual sensory prompts which merge our internal world with the external.

This collection of paintings was conceived from my daily ritual of drawing. Within my practice drawing acts as a converting lens, capturing the intangible essence of recollected sensory moments from my own life and translating them into more identifiable imagery, whilst retaining an element of their original abstract nature. This abstraction is further built on as the drawings are then used as starting points for my paintings, embedding them within colour and gesture through painterly processes familiar to the Abstract Expressionists. Processes such as dragging, dropping, scrubbing, and sloshing paint on and off the canvas disrupt recognisable imagery, slowing down the viewer’s search for familiar forms so that they can experience the painting more fundamentally through the physicality of paint across the surface.

Recognisable suggestions of the everyday such as window frames, hillsides, figures and clouds act as ways into the sensory aspects housed within these paintings, allowing the viewer to locate such moments within their own daily context. The intertwining of visceral abstraction with more tangible forms seeks to express how something feels rather than how it objectively appears.