About my work: an introduction
My work begins on the ground.
It begins with foraging––fallen leaves, plants and petals, rusted metals, soils and bark. Materials gathered not by design but by
attention: what the season offers, what the place releases, what would otherwise go unnoticed underfoot.
Materials boiled down to colour, metals left to oxidise, water carrying what the earth releases. The inks I make are unstable by
nature. They stain, bloom, crystallise, settle. They resist being fixed, frozen once dried. Their behaviour becomes a
collaborator––gravity, heat, time and chemical reactions shaping the surface alongside my hand.
Looking closely becomes a way of understanding.
Macro photography and microscopy expose the secretive, internal life of the material—a life usually hidden in minuscule
detail, overlooked in favour of the image. Scale collapses. The surface opens into a whole new minute universe. Cracks form
like dried riverbeds. Fields of colour resemble aerial landscapes or cosmic atmospheres. The crystalline structures of copper
salts look like nothing so much as constellations.
The minute echoes the vast. A sublime lives not only in mountains or open skies but in the behaviour of matter—in the quiet
drama of colours transforming, in the unpredictable way two inks react to each other, in the life that continues on the surface
long after the brush has lifted.
What appears as a painting is not just an image made by the artist, but a record of collaboration––between intention and
material, between control and release, between earth, water, time and touch. The painter's role is not to master the material
but to create the conditions in which it can speak.
This book gathers those moments of attention. It holds what the surface remembers.
Test swatches for red cabbage ink, 2025.
Studio wall, 2025.
