Statement

My work harks to a distant past, a pastoral utopia sickened by visions of the future
I was raised in the patchwork landscape of southern England, where ancient hedgerows and a lonely corner oak tell us stories of its agricultural past. Here as I crane my neck in the deep wooded hollers of East Tennessee, I sense the coming of the blade. A cut in this land too, to make a road, or flat plot for another Baptist church or Pancake house to sit.
In my paintings trees rise like bones out of a tarry ground, skies pink and orange play host to a burning horizon line. Huge swathes of cheap paper awash in class room powder paints, are cut and sewed together to form barriers and warning signs. Traffic cones made from plaster of Paris are painted with 'ground-down' iron red rocks from the creek. Drawings of sink holes, moth-eaten hemlocks and concrete block are frantically scrawled on dusty pink floor liner, and old wallpaper.
For the last fifteen years I have been making these props, fragile props for a fragile future.
My work, at its best hopes to bring awareness to the climate emergency, the frailty of our systems, and also to bring a glimmer of hope that our mark on the landscape can be absorbed and healed into a thing of beauty.