Paintings

I’m drawn to monochrome, an echo of memory of shape and how spaces court abstraction often hovering in painterly space.

Historically, my work has been carefully composed, guided by shape and characterised by content. I’m currently working towards a Masters in Fine Art at Falmouth University where I’m challenging my practise and moving away from subject matter.

These paintings are part of a continued investigation of what happens in the gaps between. Minimal applications of paint, cutting, reworking surfaces, tearing and the re-use of materials emphasize these spaces, their structural components and introduce 3D elements. The paintings/objects encourage the viewer to look in, around and beyond the 2D space generating a more intimate relationship with the work and the space it occupies, creating new memories of shape and space.

Extended time in the studio and the MA over the last couple of years have challenged my practice. Nothing has changed in my practice as a painter but everything has changed in the process of making and the narrative surrounding painting and object hood. The groups of paintings work together, each part allowing abstract shapes and spaces to control a specific dialogue surrounding the notion of space.

Japanese concept of Ma is always present

Ma (間, lit. “gap”, “space”, “pause”) is a Japanese reading of a Sino-Japanese character, which is often used to refer to what is claimed to be a specific Japanese concept of negative space. In modern interpretations of traditional Japanese arts and culture, ma is taken to refer to an artistic interpretation of an empty space, often holding as much importance as the rest of an artwork and focusing the viewer on the intention of negative space in an art piece. This theory, current since the 1960s, arises from a premise that contrasts an ostensible opposition between a ‘Western’ concept of space as a positive entity as opposed to the absence of such a principle in a correlated ‘Japanese’ notion of space.

Though commonly used to refer to literal, visible negative space, ma may also refer to the perception of a space, gap or interval, without necessarily requiring a physical compositional element. This results in the concept of ma being less reliant on the existence of a gap, and more closely related to the perception of a gap. The existence of ma in an artwork has been interpreted as “an emptiness full of possibilities, like a promise yet to be fulfilled”, and has been described as “the silence between the notes which make the music”.

Works on Paper

A series of works on paper for an exhibition in Finland.