My paintings orbit around ideas of absence, separation and secrecy. These ideas stem from my early childhood experience of parental loss, and the subsequent emptiness left behind by something that once was. I sift through my past, unravelling vague memories and whispers of conversation to scatter throughout my paintings like breadcrumbs. Objects are replaced by projections of feelings, expressed through a lexicon of mark-making that encompasses pencil scribbles and scrawls of poetry alike. Words sit within the works, hidden amongst painterly gestures and often dissolving in legibility, reduced to another form of mark-making. When paint interrupts poetry, vulnerability is interfered with. A conflict of my own creation arises in my decision to offload poetry onto canvas, only to cover it up again in a repeated process of inscription and erasure. I strive to explore the limits of vulnerability, embodied in the multitude of layers that lay beneath each painting’s surface. Taking place is an exchange between the seen and the unseen, and, more obliquely, the said and the unsaid.

The recent lockdown has forced these past, far-away feelings to resurface. Now, feelings of distance and detachment recall my past while simultaneously embodying my present. With two timelines merging, memories and moments have blurred together, hence the painterly moments of clarity that arise from fields of creamy white. Distance manifests in these negative spaces and the languid floating of the marks pulling away from one another, while the literal edges of collaged materials physicalise separation. Each mark performs as a translation of emotion. Through this lens, each painting performs as a collective of these emotions: felt, forgotten and, finally, felt once more.