b. 1978 My recent work explores different aspects of the same fundamental idea, that our lives are made up of a highly complex series of moments that, when placed together, reveal a larger pattern. My aim is to combine the simplicity of a child's approach to art with the complexities, emotions and intricacies of the adult world. I use large numbers of postcards (100/120), each one containing a drawing in ink or watercolour, which I then arrange into large-scale compositions. Some cards contain abstract images, others figurative. The completed images resemble a human figure; in and around them are trees, houses, sleeping women, floating heads, fences and birds. This amalgam of form and narrative seeks to reflect both my conscious and subconscious thought. The drawings appear random, as if looking at an open sketchbook of doodles - off-setting the child-like with the highly considered. The cards are then constantly re-ordered and reshuffled, allowing me to explore compositions, patterns and repetitions. In my clothes-peg pieces, thousands of individual pegs, each one painted with the figure of a woman, are arranged on a flat surface. The intention is to use the repeated image to create an abstract form made up of pixeleted blocks of colour. It is this 'collaboration' of components that I find interesting - pulling the viewer first into the piece and then out to reassess the whole. I have also made groups of free-standing single figures painted on glass sheets. They are ghost-like and solitary in character. The light coming through the glass causes the image to partly dissolve into its component colours. The paint is deliberately thin and transparent, like stained glass. I hope to create a discussion, or balance between the solid rectangular structures and the eerily translucent, dripping paint - a form that lies between sculpture and painting. My work is influenced by various sources, among them Louise Bourgeois, Paul Klee, Matisse, Miro, Art Brut, and in particular several of the 'Outsider' artists. I am especially interested in the obsessive compulsive quality of some of the latter's work, as well as its simplicity. The peg-pieces echo this in their labour-intensive repetitions. The minutely-hatched drawing in the postcard pieces, with their recurring dreamscape imagery, combine perpetual, obsessive mark-making with a poetic simplicity of form. Studied Awards Solo exhibitions Group exhibitions Publications
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