Artist Statement

 

Places are deceiving if only taken at face value. My work questions the elusive processes that could unite the past to the present in our environments which reflects cultural identities in a more perceptive sense. Evolving and eroding forms provide a content which links a mythological past that competes with the modern obsession for conformity and individualism. This is apparent in the art piece, “Memoriae” which combines the rediscovery of a primitive forest on a Welsh beach with a Celtic tale that foretells man’s self-centred destructive abuse of nature. Allowing these real-life settings and narratives to formulate visual metaphors is what I strive to achieve.

These latest paintings, whether incorporating found objects or using multiple layers, create oneiric, psychological spaces that reveal something of their hidden stories, twisting, turning, and mutating into rock faces or waves, sometimes forming anthropomorphic forms, but always conveying change. Unity and motion are often undercurrents in Celtic art which have imbued my Welsh heritage and influenced the locations I have drawn my ideas from.

My figurative paintings position the human form within environments that symbolize alienation, fertility or, as in the case of Shelly’s Ozymandias, displacement, and decay. Again, reinterpreting European myths such as Dierdre of the Sorrows, provide a catalyst to identify these common human experiences with nature which, in modern science, is now called biophilia.