Artist statement

My practice is rooted in the expanded field of painting by merging reclaimed wood that hold marks and histories of their previous existence and combining it with conditions commonly associated with painting: pigment, canvas, brush, frame and colour. My work becomes a synthesis of painting, sculpture, and installation by using the reclaimed wood to build structures and wall mounted assemblages that can move beyond two-dimensional boundaries, here the traditional materials of painting are unravelled, and the components find a new existence.

Working within the expanded field of painting allows me to navigate the physical and conceptual boundaries of painting. My process is materials-led where I continually push the use of materials and methods within my practice. I employ improvisation and the instinctual gesture, combined with an aesthetic sensibility, to arrive at final outcomes, where risk and failure become an inherent part of this process.

For this body of work I have built a large structure using the repurposed wood as it gave me the means to take painting away from the wall and meet the viewer in open space. I wanted to explore the transgressive possibilities of painting by deconstructing and unravelling the components and process commonly associated with painting, and reconstructing, to create a three-dimensional structure. The wooden stretcher and frame now get extended to become central to the work. The means of their construction remain visible in the screws and fixtures, revealing the process itself. The actions of making get absorbed to become part of the subject and object of the work: sawing, drilling, stacking, sanding, staining, painting, where the materials hold marks of their previous life, these scars are markers of time passed and are conflated with my personal gesture. Details invite closer inspection, the frame-like structure has multiple viewing positions - through, up, down - revealing different painted surfaces. Flashes of colour appear and disappear as the viewer moves in the space.

My smaller wall-based works are composed of a wide variety of contemporary and historic materials and supports, including oil paint, linen, canvas, paper, plaster, clay, latex, and ready-made objects. Disrupting a methodological and conservative painting practice to divert attention to the objectness of painting meant abandoning pictorial function. Here the paintings are pared back to reductive compositions where emphasis is instead directed to irregular shapes, surfaces, materials, and colour as substance.