My painting practice begins with a search for space, an indirect way of negotiating my own identity. I work with images of bodies in motion, often drawn from sports magazines and instructional manuals, where physicality is staged, idealised, and distant. These materials, which typically frame the body as a site of power, control, and masculinity, become starting points for disruption. I recast their language; structured, coded, and performative, into something more intimate, unstable, and emotionally charged.

These borrowed gestures allow me to explore personal tensions around desire, restriction, and visibility without turning the work into an autobiography. Instead, I fragment, recontextualise, and obscure the imagery, letting it speak in codes and contradictions that mirror the ambiguity of selfhood.

When approaching the studio to paint, I slip into one of two personalities, each delivering contrasting results. The first personality paints methodically and embraces the time taken to present imagery as a dedication to the image itself, honouring how it made me feel in the moment I first encountered it. This slow engagement validates and clarifies my instincts.

The second personality operates within a field of instinctual flux, harnessing chance and immediacy to generate emergent forms. It is only through subsequent reflection that I apprehend an unconscious intentionality; an operative logic that exceeds and precedes conscious control, revealing the latent structures underpinning the act of creation.

This interplay between time and approach enacts a formal and conceptual instability, allowing the work to remain contingent, suspended between intention and accident, structure and collapse. In this space of oscillation, the paintings resist closure, instead asserting themselves as sites of ongoing negotiation.

My work resists a linear narrative. Instead, it exists in coded gestures and fragmented forms that invite multiple readings. Though deeply personal, the paintings do not demand confession; they offer space to encounter tension surrounding a living dialogue between control and surrender, presence and absence, self and other, inviting engagement within the same ambiguous space where identity is restless…