ARTIST STATEMENT

I am a British painter working with oil paint, charcoal and drawing. My work explores the body as something lived through rather than simply observed.

I am interested in the way grief, care, responsibility, dependency and psychological pressure can become physically felt. In my work, the figure is often distorted, compressed or fragmented. Limbs merge, faces shift and bodies appear to buckle, lean or press into one another. I am not trying to describe the body accurately; I am more interested in what it can reveal about what it has carried.

Care sits at the centre of much of my practice, but I do not see it as simple or sentimental. Protection can exist alongside fear, duty and control, while dependency can bring both comfort and a loss of autonomy. I am drawn to these contradictions and to the tension between vulnerability and endurance.

My portraits approach the face in a similar way. Rather than focusing only on likeness, I treat the face as a psychological surface where pressure, memory and experience can become visible.

There is a personal thread running through the work, shaped by grief, motherhood and experiences of care and authority. I do not want to illustrate specific events. Instead, I use lived experience as a starting point, allowing it to reshape the figure and asking what remains when the body has been required to carry more than it comfortably can.