My paintings examine the nature of seeing and the act of painting. The way we relate to the world and the information we take from it cannot be understood apart from the dominant forms of visual media which surround us, as Marshall McLuhan so clearly saw. I am interested in the way that modern technology changes how people communicate and alters notions of distance and time, presence and absence. Baudelaire characterised modernity as  “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.”  When images taken through the lens of a web cam or phone camera are mediated by the slow, subjective medium of painting, they are brought from the realm of the modern and the ephemeral into the “other half” of “the eternal and the immutable”.  The paintings become the body for the disembodied, de-materialised nature of digital communication.

My recent paintings are inspired by screenshots of Skype conversations with my family in America, who are unaware that I have been capturing and giving physical presence to their onscreen images. The black edges of these paintings hint at the bounded, finite nature of the web camera’s window into another world.

In my investigation I exploit the syntax of oil paint – its formal qualities such as  transparency, viscosity, and variation in the mark – using additive and reductive techniques. My painting practice is informed by art historical techniques and the intersection of traditional and modern materials and methods.

It is important to me to create generous art objects that reward contemplation, and above all, that the paintings succeed as paintings.