Does Art Enrich Life?

My current practice seeks ways for visual art to entice audiences to pause and reflect on our present state, and to act as a catalyst for conversations and explorations about our engagement with our places and each other. A call to stop, go gently, contemplate and take-stock with care for our natural surroundings, our place and our fragile mental and physical health. In this sense art can enrich and question our daily experiences of life.

I work mainly with paint and found materials and sometimes performance and text to explore ideas about our encounters with landscape, place, self and other. Central to my observations and mark making is a concern for space, light, and the material substances of my subjects and the processes from which our  understanding and experiences of our surroundings and histories coalesce and evolve. The effects of erosion, accumulation, growth and recycling find expression in my use of found materials including ash, soil and stone from specific sites of interest, mixed with paint and traditional mediums to mediate between place and the process of making. These found materials often find their way onto the painting canvas or into the exhibition space as an archive of their source location. They form a presence, a material trace of the actual place.  The process of collection and making is often strongly evidenced in my work inviting the viewer to recognise and respond to the embedded or associated found materials as both source and representation. This evocation solicits a material connection with the original place whilst forming a material surface on some canvases which renders the subject more abstract and elusive.