ARTIST STATEMENT

My paintings are about expected cataclysmic end of our familiar earth. The world in 2100 will be radically different from ours:I have chosen to depict mutated animals to depict this world.

Using acrylic on canvas, I have created five paintings of such creatures, each referencing a classic work from the art canon: Olympia (Manet), the Birth of Venus (Boticelli), the Third of May (Goya), Departure (Max Beckmann) and St George and the Dragon (depicted in numerous sculptures and paintings).

My work can be seen as examples both of eccentric figuration and of magic realism, with elements of appropriation as I use earlier works as the basis for my compositions. My work is vividly coloured acrylic on canvas. It sits between abstraction and figuration and is strongly gestural. I would like viewers to be both engaged and alarmed as they look at my work, and to reflect on their role in saving the planet and its creatures.

My drawings are of car parks, places we all regularly and unhappily inhabit. I depict them as places of chaos and confusion. Car parks are realms of the underworld, an archetypal realm of suffering, yet perhaps redemption. Negotiating the challenges of a car park could be seen as a metaphor for life itself.