top of page
IMG_7957.JPG
Home: About
IMG_7955.JPG
Home: Quote

RECENT WORK

Home: Text
Home: Pro Gallery

Having a squint as a child hindered my depth perception. When looking at a landscape separate objects at different distances often appear to me to merge and form one painterly looking body. I indulge this pareidolia or patterning and in the studio make small collages, cutting, ripping and folding paper to create shadows and effects. I use these collages as a basis for my larger paintings which I tongue in cheek call not-figurative paintings because the faces included do not function as faces but help to make up abstract shapes which suggest facial features but are not actually faces at all. In doing so, these paintings playfully undermine traditional distinctions between abstract and figurative art. Our perception of the world is of endless fascination to me. It is a learned experience, practised through life and subconsciously agreed with others to form the structures of our subjective realities. That is not to say that nothing is real. My paintings are real objects. The anxiety I experience when alone in nature feels real but is largely a distortion. I love the sensation of moving delicious oil paint around to explore light, shadow and colour. This feels as real as life gets.

Home: Text

PAINTINGS 2020

Home: Gallery

WAR ON TERROIR 2019

This series of paintings named, War on Terroir are all painted on adverts from Frieze magazine, first mounted onto canvas. Whilst primarily concerned with exploring colour, form, and spontaneous mark making, the paintings also consider the relationship between purity, taste and call for a reevaluation of what constitutes contamination. They discuss the possibility of the grand idea of a painting as a form protest, slowly and almost biologically spreading beyond the sterile environment of the gallery or Art Fair. At the same time they also worry about the possibility of painting descending into a futile kind of virtue signalling, biting the hand that feeds it.

Home: Gallery

Liquid  Modernity  
MFA Show Goldsmiths College
July 2018

During my Masters research I was struck by how similar Zygmunt Bauman's description of industrial and societal change reflected the changes undergone by my own family history over the last three generations. The Miner's Strike and the opening of the UK's first IKEA store in my home town coincided with my own adolescence and search for masculinity. I was lost in a heady concoction of labour activism, picket line violence and home furnishing.

Home: Photo Gallery

“The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.”


Having ignored the advice inherent in William Blake’s aphorism for a long time, I eventually followed my folly and photographed the contents of my compost bin in December 2018. I finally answered the pulsating, subconscious energy that is the mass of the Earth’s compost which was calling me. 


I have photographed it regularly since then. Prompted by an interest in pareidolia, essentially seeing faces in things, I look for a suggestion a of face in the head sized rotting sculptures I make from my food waste. I post them on instagram, inserted amongst the hashtags #instafoodie #instarecipe #cheflife etc. I see them as causing a mild disruption amongst the scrolling recipes and curated, seductive, food galleries. They are not wise but an absurd reminder of our impermanence as a species and the waste we produce through our consumption. We, our ideas and our art will eventually return to compost.

@CompostBinHead is pleased to be featured on Cosmos Carl - Parasite Platform.

https://www.facebook.com/events/171340814142080/

ARTICLE IN MISTER MOTLEY MAGAZINE

Compost head_#pareidolia #iseefaces.jpg
Home: Projects
Phil 2.jpg

2010-13

These paintings reference the certainty of mid twentieth century American painting for reasons of both admiration and irony. They question the traditional cliche of the male painter as a macho, misogynist genius and the screen as the dominant cultural guide. Great painters but awful fathers.

The answers in my paintings are all taken from the game Trivial Pursuit, Genus Edition,1981. These lists of answers make a strange sense to me and have a poetic quality.

I intentionally used domestic implements to paint rather than the brush. An cake icing bag filled with impasto paint for the letters and an electric sander to make gestures. 

Making these paintings was very performative, it was easy to fantasise that it was 1950 and I was fulfilling Greenbergian principles of flatness.

Home: Welcome
Home: Pro Gallery
Home: Pro Gallery