
About
While my large-scale oil paintings teem with physiological details – a grotesquely comic multitude of human and animal eyes, teeth and limbs – these figurative elements evolve out of a kind of primordial abstraction. Each work begins with a process of unplanned, almost automatic mark making, during which I’m concerned not with creating imagery, but rather with channeling energy from the world outside the canvas onto its flat, bounded plane. Once enough pigment has been amassed, it starts to suggest motifs, in much the same way as certain clouds seem to mimic the shapes of Earthly objects, or shadows on the lunar surface summon up a “man in the moon”. (This subcortical characteristic of visual perception is known as pareidolia, and is intimately connected to the human fight or flight response).
Aware of the embryonic faces pressing through my paint, I work consciously towards bringing them into full being. This is a process that involves both embellishment and sublimation, creation and destruction, and one that tracks my shifting focus, stimuli and emotional state over the gestation period of a given canvas. The result is a seething mass of pigment, in which the physical boundaries between one monstrous, cartoonish figure and another are destabilized, and any hierarchy between image and abstraction is replaced by a roiling, polymorphous field of paint.
To look at these works is to be confronted by an excess of visual information, with nothing in the way of a central, anchoring motif, and they might best be understood as a topography to explore, and perhaps to lose (or indeed find) oneself in. Informed by Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of the ‘carnivalesque’, my paintings present a vision of suppressed libidinal energies let loose on the world, of distinctions between high and low upended, of the messy, democratizing, fundamentally human stuff of desire rising ineluctably to the surface.
Education
2023/2024 Royal College of Art, MA Painting
2019 - 2021 Turps Banana, studio painting programme
2015 - 2017 Central Saint Martins, MA Fine Art
Selected Exhibitions
2025
Songs of Innocence and Experience, Gallerie Brescia, Brescia
Through the Looking Glass, JD Malat Gallery, London
2024
Chasing Rabbits, Kravets Wehby, New York
Being Human, Morris Adjemi Architechts, New York
Untitled Art Fair/Kravets Wehby, MiamiNew York
Apocalyptic Changes of State, BWG Gallery, London
Chicago Expo, Kravets Wehby, Chicago
Kravets Wehby, New York
Palimpsestic Impressions, Arusha Gallery, London
2023
State of Play, Ojiri Gallery London
Beyond the Gaze, Saatchi Gallery with Charlie Smith London
Two Imposters, Four You Gallery, online
Swamp Legends, Terrace Gallery, London
Combat Stress charity auction, Bankside Gallery, London
A triumph of Life, Four You Gallery, Paris
2021
Outsider Art/Kindred Spirits, Harley Gallery, Nottinghamshire
Art on a Postcard, Soho Revue Gallery, London
Another Kind of Life, Four You Gallery, Online
In the Eye of The Beholder, Four You Gallery, Online
2019
Miniscule, in association with Cross Lane Projects, Venice.
Face to Face, London contemporary Art Auction, Warsaw
Empire II, Oaxaca In Association with the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca.
Miniscule, Cross Lane Projects, Kendal, UK
2018
Empire II Tallinn Art Week in Association with Haus Gallery
Journeys: Outside In, Sotheby's London.
Bainbridge Open, ASC Gallery, London
2017
Badenfahrt festival, Switzerland.
Empire II, Venice, Brussels, Berlin, Kendall.
An Art School, Tate Exchange, London
Selected Awards
2022 Derbyshire Award for Emerging Artists, London
2016 Roy Pace Moving Image award, London
2009 Koestler Awards. Royal Festival Hall, London.
2009 Outside In, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester.