STATEMENT OF WORK

Painting is a place where I can convey the body in a fractured, awkward state rather than in its composed, outer-world reality. Figurative and bodily experiences are not whole, clean and defined, but slippery and morphing. In our own bodily relations we can have skewed connections to body parts; the sudden awareness of forgotten legs in a bath; imagining our silhouettes are as twisted as a Grunewald painting; the sensation of a feature appearing oddly enlarged to others as it is so prominent in our minds.

My practice is a series of decisions that let me evoke this kind of psychic distortion of the figure, by chasing a formal or material distortion in painting. My impatience to translate a figure seen in a book or in the street serves up wonky proportions, and that wonkiness for me is charged with an oblique energy. Drawing a figure from memory can enliven the outline of them, squeezing the image through the distorting lens of recollection. Collaging the canvas brings me to formal awkwardness when a cut line severs a body in half, forcing it to intersect with another figure. All of these material actions are ways to make something that feels external to me, surprising.

Over the course of a painting these figurative observations are multiplied, enlarged, brought up close, dramatized. Single words relating to bodily states circle in my mind, like invocations, or instructions: ‘Hardened. Entombed. Soft. Muscular. Opening’. These words slowly correlate with their formal equivalent of a hardened strong line, or a soft-focus undefined pool of colour. Throughout, I picture giving what is invisible new bodies.