2024 - Light Impressions
Printmaking is basically the process of transferring pigment from one surface to another – often using a printing press.
My preferred method of printmaking is the monotype – which is essentially a way of painting with a printing press. Because I do not generally carve, etch, or scratch an image onto the printing plate, each work is a one-off piece (hence the name ‘monotype’). Once the inked plate has been through the press and the image transferred to paper, the plate is simply wiped down, a blank canvas, ready to start again.
For me, one of the main attractions of printmaking is how its processes has fed into my painting practice – a big part of that has been my explorations around the use of texture. The two disciplines are very much aligned, and I find that the practices continually feed into one another.
Whilst the printmaking component is integral to the overall look of the work, much of it also involves an element hand-colouring – whether that’s painting or pastel work. Ultimately, everything is in service to the image.
2023 - Images of Broken Light
2022 - Atavistic Dreams
2018 - Solitary Tilt
2017 - Images & Distorted Facts
2015 - A Carnival of Restraint
I was asked by my gallery to produce a series of works for an exhibition based around the still life. The aim was to provide a contemporary take on that most traditional of genres.
The still life has had a long and well established history of using visual symbolism – the objects depicted often had a literal as well as a separate symbolic or allegorical meaning.
The vanitas works of the 17th Century are perhaps the most obvious example of this in which the painted objects were loaded with references regarding the transient nature of life and ‘man’s vanity’.
The vessel has often been used within the still life genre as a stand-in for the human form (or the human soul) and I wanted to touch on these ideas within this series of works. The everyday vessel or container therefore became the focal point – by stripping away superfluous detail, I wanted to enhance and assert the integrity of the humble vessel.
At the same time, however, I wanted to try and imbue these works with a feeling of stillness or timelessness that transcends the simple still life tropes, to suggest or evoke something beyond that which is merely depicted.
2007 - Legacy & La Petite Mort Exhibitions
Beginnings and endings. Where there is life there is death – to contemplate life is to also acknowledge one’s mortality. This body of work represents my response to a personal loss; it has become a mediation on death.
Death of love, death of the day, loss of time, loss of place – ‘loss’ in its broadest sense can be seen in many guises. These works reflect my attempts to give artistic voice to the ‘indescribable’- an exploration of loss and longing, of those things intangible and unknowable.
A number of these works reference the inescapable biological processes of replication and decay, of blood and disease, the cycle of life, of both the beginnings and the end of life – it is a focus on the abject, the primal, that underpins this body of work.
