My studio practice begins long before I start painting. Walking allows me to experience landscape through movement, weather, sound and changing light. I make photographs, sketchbook marks and written notes, but I am equally interested in what remains after the details have faded.
In the studio, photographs, fragments, drawings, words and material experiments gather on my inspiration wall. I think of it as a kind of story map: not fixed or chronological, but continually rearranging itself and influencing what I notice in the work.
I am increasingly interested in materials that carry a physical relationship to place. Paper connects back to trees and fibre; pigments can come from local stone; wood, charcoal, plant fibres and found fragments can hold their own histories.
These materials are not simply decorative additions. They allow the landscape to enter the work in another form.
Some marks are repeated slowly and almost meditatively. Others happen through pouring, washing, bleeding and allowing materials to move. I value the point at which I have to respond to something I did not plan.
The accidental marks often feel closest to those I notice outside — stains, erosion, water lines and weathered surfaces formed over time rather than designed by a human hand.
Translucency allows one moment to remain
visible through another. I often cover, reveal, remove and rebuild sections of
a painting so that its history is never completely erased.
For me, this has a close relationship with
memory. We do not retrieve the past intact; we reconstruct it through the
present.