My paintings are derived from imagery. Images that are important to me, that stand out as significant and possess a certain power and potency that captures me. I want to take an image and manipulate, disguise, deface and disfigure it to make it more personal and more significant to me. I play around with scale, surface and texture in order to render the original image almost unidentifiable or take the image out of its original context to create ambiguity. I am particularly interested in the way the face can be manipulated, disfigured and decorated to be representational of a community, a collective, group or gang. Or can help to represent a period of history or a significant event. Masks and face painting play a major role in influencing the way I look at a face and paint it on canvas. I mainly work with figurative photographs but the image could also be a drawing that I have made or a found object that I have documented or in a lot of cases, a painting that I find evocative. I use these images together to construct a composition that may or may not include a narrative; it is the act of defacing the images and placing them in a scenario that is congruous to my desire that is of paramount importance. Narrative often comes afterwards as a result of multiple images in a series of work being amalgamated together. The amalgamation of images is derived from urban walls covered with fragments of torn posters, graffiti and advertisements.
New Sensations London 2001, The Curwin Gallery, London.
BP Portrait Award 2001, The National Portrait Gallery, London.
BP portrait Award 2002, The National Portrait Gallery, London.
People need People 2002, Gascoigne Gallery, Harrogate.
Group Exhibition 2003, The Wave Gallery, Kendal.
Autumn Exhibition 2003, Thompsons Gallery, London.
Winter Exhibition 2003, Dean Clough Galleries, Halifax
Designfesta 2005, Makuhari Messe. Tokyo.
Mallory Wise 2006, Mizonokuchi, Tokyo.
Group Exhibition 2007, Smiths Private Dining Room, London.
Solo Exhibition 2008, Cimmermann Interiors, Harrogate.
AAF London. 2009
AAF London. 2010 with Nick Whistler Fine Art
AAF London 2011 with Nick Whistler Fine Art
Selected Works On Paper. Urban Outfitters, London. 2011
Group Exhibition, The Workhouse Gallery, Harrogate 2012
The Other Art Fair, London. 2012
The Other Art Fair, London. May 2013
‘Foxes and Hounds’, Solo Exhibition, The Workhouse Gallery, Harrogate. June 2013
The Other Art Fair, London. Oct 2013
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