In this series I continue to work the vein of memory and story that has run through my previous series, exploring how what is past or now absent leaves its traces in our present.

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In my paintings the resulting overlapping planes present the viewer with a world where memory, absence, presence, and future co-exist within one space. While some works seem to capture a moment in time, and hold it, hovering, other canvases have gathered and compressed all trace of time and movement until they seep and streak across the ground. Many of these works carry a sense of shifting planes, of looking beyond, to a landscape on the rim of recognition.

Wherever it is that the you find me leading you with this visual language, it is a place not on the map(1).

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I am inspired by both contemporary developments in art as well as sources as diverse as Middle Eastern art (both contemporary and traditional), Gothic and Renaissance religious landscapes, and Roccoco art and design. The intimacy, colours and complexity of some of these works are a nod to Persian miniatures, yet my process is an active, spontaneous response to the alchemy of gesture and paint. My surfaces move from highly tactile passages created with fingers, mediums and luscious paint, to sheer scraped back, shifting, washed and scrubbed back layers and veils of paint. Forgoing a set “destination” for each of these works, I choose instead to allow the painting to take me where it will, choosing to pause often and sit with it, until I gain a fresh sense of where it's leading.

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 (1) “Language is a map leading to a place not on the map…”  from The Presence of Absence. Simon Van Booy