My work is inspired by feelings of nostalgia, transformation, the kitsch, found items and memories.

 

I am motivated by personal experience. Growing up in 80s East End London, rummaging around market stalls in Hackney with my Dad, and visiting my alcoholic aunt in her prefab, and other memories all play a part in my work. Looking at second-hand items, picking out small ornaments or anything that glistened or caught my eye, influenced me.

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I work with collage and assemblage using paper and 3D objects that I have collected over the years. I source and find these materials, sometimes broken and worn ceramic ornaments or tacky souvenir items which are rich in nostalgia.  Old or new, anything exciting and intriguing is used to create my own little fantasy world rich in emotions of sentimentality, wistfulness, loss, fond memories, history and a sense of passage and pilgrimage through time.  Nostalgia is central in my work, the juxtaposition of feeling pleasure but also slight sadness about things that happened in the past.

 

These themes have led me to folklore, using stop-motion animation to re-animate images and stories that have only existed in people's memories through the unseen and oral tradition. These stories have been passed down through time and are our heritage. I try to create a dream-like world.

 

I am drawn to strong bold colours and feel attracted to the brightness and energy of them.  As well as exploring feelings of pleasure and sadness in my practice, I work with colours in the same vein, to push the boundaries of comfortable and uncomfortable, sometimes over-colouring or adorning my work.  I want to open new interpretive possibilities with my practice, go beyond the established and expected, pushing into the uncanny, and changing and morphing familiar artefacts.

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My paintings run on similar themes, exploring figures with masks. This runs alongside themes of the unseen, and images at the edge of our vision. The mask is uncanny, conceals, it can hide and withhold, disguise, or it may even amuse or frighten the viewer. It's a way of changing and morphing an image. Change like this is a strong thread in my work, whether it's altering images, or the unsettled, fluid shifting of folk tales through time, I want to capture these emotions and sensations in my work.