‘During the Endless Night She Felt Herself Losing Her Mind’

Oil on canvas
76cm x 48.5cm

After finishing my M A at Chelsea college of art I took a teaching job at Kingston university where I remained for six years. I relocated back to Lancashire in the year 2000. Having set up my painting practice I was ready to embark on a new body of work that would occupy my painting up to this day. When I left school I served an apprenticeship in butchering and it is this skill that I have fallen back on for two days a week to earn money to pay the bills. This allows me to make work for the rest of the week and to buy art materials.

The current body of work draws on images from photographs of family and friends from my childhood and teenage years. While there is clearly an autobiographical thread, there are touch points within the images which offer a wider resonance as they reference time, geography and social class.

These paintings represent the interrogation of my past; what we inherit, what we cherish and what we choose to discard, which becomes the narrative of our lives. These paintings are about passing time, loss and our mortality, but ultimately they are about love.