Background

1979

Foundation year at Exeter College of Art and Design.

1980 - 1983

In 1983, I graduated from the Byam Shaw College of Art (subsequently amalgamated with Central St Martin's). This was an extremely energetic and exciting time, during which I discovered an interest in holography, then an embryonic science and one with far reaching, but unexploited artistic potential. The projects from this period, combined with continued work in the holographic field after leaving college, laid the foundations for the direction I am continuing with today.

To support my artistic endeavours during the 1980's, I worked as a freelance muralist and special paints effects artist for private and corporate clients in London - this continued until 1992.

After some years in Germany, a move to Somerset in 1999 to raise my family allowed me to reconnect with my painting and I exhibited regularly in the South West of England. The Bowlish Gallery showed my work at the Affordable Art Fairs in London and Bristol and I shared two exhibitions at the Gallery in Cork Street, London, in 2005 and 2008.  More recently in November 2016 I had a solo exhibition "As if anything here belonged to you..." with Showcase Gallery in Dubai.

In the last eight years I have been lucky enought to travel extensively and to live in Pakistan, East Africa and currently in the Midde East. All of these places have provided enormous inspiration, for very different reasons. I am now in a position to take advantage of these experiences and re-engage full time with my art work.

My subject matter is sourced from the rhythms and processes of nature and the spatial illusions created by the movement of light. I am fascinated by the way light fragments or mutates the appearance and significance of form, often making incorporeal and solid matter appear interchangeable and so rendering pre-conceptions of the subject open to question. My work is concerned with our impact on this world, experience in it and the understanding we derive, both personally and collectively, during our passage.

While my ideas will almost always be sourced from a physical experience, such as the play of light, a poem, an event, a statement or a 'find' of some sort, when they are running, they independently gather layers and concepts, developing their own identities and demands and determining their own result.  Each work is the unpredictable result of the balance between intent and process.

I enjoy the dialogue between apparently unrelated materials and am currently working with metal leaf, a spatially abstracting and unforgiving medium, on cured skin - a basic parchment from Pakistan, also with a life of its own.  In the 'Silver Bullet' series and Empty Quarter - Sacrifice, the combination of these materials might be assumed to reference the potentially violent implications of the subject matter. Conversely, it could be percieved that the exuberent quality of the gold leaf is attempting to negate the violence, persuading us to objectify our fears and accept that the passage of time and evolution rolls on regardless of them.

The intention of all my work is to penetrate material or conceptual interpretation and look within and beyond what we actually see to try and find the inner dimension which eclipses culture, violence, loss and fear.  In aiming to make the invisible visible, it is a search for that rythm which drives nature, transcends the individual and helps us to accept and run with what we have, making peace with ourselves and our diminutive personal contribution during our short stay.

e-mail: [email protected]