My practice is painting: But it is a practice that challenges, subverts and questions ideas about surface, material and construction.  I am a process painter and my work sits with artists that dissect the materiality of paint, exploring different ways to create paintings. 

At the core of my practice is experimentation; reducing painting to its basic elements - wood, liquid, pigment and fabric - and reconstructing it into new forms.  I don’t plan outcomes, instead I try to let the material speak. I respond and scrutinize.  My aim is to watch and allow chance-happenings, without a sense of hierarchy between my actions and those of the materials.  However, I’m not a purist and while I might I eliminate the artist’s hand in favour of pouring, splashing and waiting, sometimes I work gesturally.  The final work can emerge from the items that I haven’t touched – such as the Underneath painting series - or from a process I have worked over and manipulated.

Recently my work has focused on the liquidity of acrylic paint, canvas and the wooden stretcher.  Acrylic size, canvas sealant, and the final layers of white gesso primer give the painting form and the absorbent properties of canvas become the tools of making rather than simply a surface.   I often play with the motifs of modernist painting – particularly the grid – and in my Reverse painting series, it emerges as an index of the original surface, subverted and hidden by the flow of thin layers of paint slowly dripped through to the reverse of the canvas.