Statement

My work makes use of viscous oil glazes that collapse and run down the surface, underscoring a fluid entropy in the thought processes that carry images from recall to representation. Studio time is often a form of rehearsal, involving drawing on, scraping down, or sculpting into preliminary work. Even as these repetitions threaten the cohesive surface of the picture, I feel they bring me closer to the point where materials and subject matter become inseparable and unknowable. Parallel to this attention to painting’s natural history is an interest in art-historical influences: these influences often strike me as being in a state of abandonment, a vacant space to be temporarily inhabited.

I have long been drawn to the studio environment for its sensation of magnetic absence - the open-ended invitation to influence and accident - and the connection this reveals between paintings and their constituent materials. This experience is something I would like to make available to viewers, as the kind of formless inertia that gathers around the margins of the painting or projects itself in the interference of sheen and dust. Above all I would like to create a kind of solidarity with the viewer’s attention as itself wayward, fragile and improvised.

Recently I find myself contributing to the paintings’ supports in ways that mimic the repetitive gestures of painting: lining the reverse side of the canvas with scraps of paper collected in my house and studio. Glazing and gluing, scraping and layering, gradually come to affect one another across the divide of seen and unseen. Their manifestation - the painting's support as sculpture- emerges like a mollusc shell, from the inside out. To the degree that this process represents an escape from self-consciousness, it also calls attention to a persistent homesickness.