Artist Statement:

Before a painting is an image, it is an organic object: a wooden scaffold, a weave, a skin of colour. I see a painting as something grown, rather than made. Its reds rise from insects and roots, its blues and greens from stones formed over millennia, its binders from seeds and animals. Before a painting is an image, it is a body: an organism grown from the natural world carrying each of its aspects within its layers.

 

Through my work, I aim to highlight these aspects of painting through the crafting of painted compositions which consist entirely of  hand-prepared materials: stretcher bars shaped from wood, canvases woven thread by thread, pigments precipitated from plants, insects, and minerals, paints ground by hand, and each layer laid over the last until an image begins to surface as an expression of the underlying materiality. This method of working grows out of my training as a painting conservator, which acquainted me with traditional artistic techniques and equipped me to read a painting as a record of how it came to fruition. 

 

A painting carries history as well as matter. Trace a pigment to its source and the route often runs through empire: cochineal harvested in the colonial Americas and shipped across the Atlantic, madder dug from Ottoman soil and traded across Europe. Their presence in a painting speaks of a world joined by trade, and of the violence that joined it. My work centres on making these histories visible and tangible through the reproduction of the associated materials and artistic processes.

 

Many of the skills behind these materials are slipping out of living practice. I seek to carry them forward through my art as working knowledge. Before a painting is an image, it is an inheritance: techniques passed from hand to hand, materials carried across oceans, living histories held within its layers, as well as questions around to whom such knowledge has been passed.