I am a landscape artist, living and working in Cornwall. I studied for my degree in Fine Art at Winchester School of Art and then moved back to Cornwall where I continue to be inspired by the sea and rugged Cornish coastline. I am captivated by the intricacies of the landscape; the texture of rocks, the variety of brickwork on buildings and details on boats. My inspiration is driven from the compulsion to create something which matches how I am feeling whilst allowing me to mediate with the world around me and maintain order in chaos. I often experience sound and other sensory information very intensely. Sometimes the level of extreme stimulation can become overwhelming.
When I experience this sensory intensity, I manage it by channeling it into my paintings to create something which is equally intense. My paintings are a reflection of how I view the world as I strive to make sense of what is going on around me.
Despite often feeling rather ‘intense’ I use the way I process information to my advantage. The control of precision painting helps me to stay grounded and I often notice tiny details in the landscape, so I make my artwork about that. In my ongoing Easting Northing series I find myself drawn to textures such as rock surfaces or what is happening at my feet. The paintings I create of these surfaces come from an intense, laboured process of analysis, research and planning. This process is not only extremely therapeutic but also epitomises my approach to day-to-day activities.
These paintings allow me to experiment with blurring the boundaries between reality and artifice, possibly prompting a deeper scrutiny which is reflective of how I analyse and process information. I am fascinated by the theory of Jean Baudrillard’s treatise of simulacra and simulation which examines the relationship between reality and imitation.
In order to further play with these themes, in 2017 I began research into the relationship between scale and the relative size of things in the universe, resulting in a series of works that explore the concept of an image generating many different scale interpretations depending on its presentation, and once again prompting a deeper consideration into exactly what it is.