ARTIST STATEMENT

Painting is a way for me to crack open fixed notions of identity in favour of something closer to our true nature – a constant state of becoming. I scribble, make marks, splash paint and scrawl on the canvas - using painting as an intuitive act that gets beneath the surface of our otherwise well polished, edited and fixed versions of self.  

In the act of painting, personal experiences, overheard bits of dialogue, internal monologue and fragments of thought collide on the canvas with what the act of painting loosens from my subconscious mind: the archetypal, the repressed, desires, fears, self-perceptions. 

All of this is captured and exists in the images archaeologically - as partial evidence of the past, while simultaneously lending itself to new, emerging narratives. Lines and splashes of paint are morphed into landscapes, forms and figures temporarily halted on their way to becoming something else while still retaining the whiff of something ineffably familiar. They both testify to and cancel the past. Like Foucault said, “I don’t say things because they are what I think, I say them as a way to make sure they no longer are what I think…” 

The fragmented forms, partial landscapes and bits of text are like notes written to ourselves; scrawled on a scrap of paper in the hopes that having written it we will remember what seemed so important. Discovering these scraps later, we rarely recall what we were thinking at the time.

Because these images are not purely rational nor purely subconscious, (but are a combination of both), rational analysis fails the viewer. I intentionally create a space that resists easy definitions and one-dimensional readings. “This reminds me of,” is only useful if it is in service of,  “Where might this take me?” In this terrain, questions are more important than answers.