Artist Statement

I make semi-figurative and expressionist oil paintings of myself and women I know, many of whom, like me, have had complicated relationships with their bodies. The works draws on familiar everyday experiences: resting, waiting, dancing, laughing, hiding, raging and enduring.

I am interested in how women live in their bodies and what those bodies hold: joy, grief, humour, pride, shame, tenderness, scars, resilience and memory. I am fascinated by the ways we hold ourselves; how bodies curl, protect, rest, hide, perform, take up space and sometimes seem awkwardly at home in themselves.

I am less interested in realism than in recognition; the feeling of something emotionally true or quietly understood. Limbs may stretch, parts of the body become exaggerated, while others are left out altogether, shaped by memory, emotion and what feels important in the moment.

Built slowly through many layers, the work keeps revisions, imperfections, uncertainty and awkwardness present. I often discover the image through painting rather than beginning with a fixed idea. As an aphantasic artist, I have no internal visual imagery and cannot picture what I am about to paint. Instead, the work develops through memory, feeling and repeated looking. Faces are often simplified or absent, allowing space for something familiar and widely recognised.

It matters to me that women recognise something of themselves here.

The work sits within a wider tradition of figurative abstraction, with affinities to Georg Baselitz, Chantal Joffe, Amy Sillman, Katherine Bradford and Louise Bourgeois, whose work variously embraces memory, humour, disruption and the emotional life of the body.

Collectors experience my work as expressive, powerful and emotional.

My works are in private collections in the United Kingdom, Europe and United States and can be viewed at BlueHouse artspace