My paintings deal with border crossings. They are an exploration of the boundaries of paintings (their edges, the straight lines that enclose them). They are also an open-ended exploration of other boundaries, a working through of the idea of inbetween spaces. 

My work usually begins with an encounter certain kinds of source material, more recently with cuttings from National Geographic Magazines from the 1960s and 70s.The work born of my encounter with these materials deals with ambiguous images, which seem to belong to a faded or bleached out past. I try to respond directly to these images, but my paintings inevitably work on the images, transforming and mutating them, changing their feel, their texture and their meanings.

The appearance of my artwork might be termed ‘exotic’: their colours and textures make it difficult to think of them as in any sense reminiscent of real events. This way of exploring the external world through photographs mirrors the motive of most of my paintings, which depict human figures coming to terms with their immediate environment. This inquiry, I think, closes up the space between viewer and viewed, internal/external, real/unreal.

More recently, I have become interested in looking at and working on images of beaches. This raises for me questions about the meaning and status of borders and limits. It seems to me that beaches offer an ideal arena in which to investigate transgressions between land and sea, the concrete and abstract spheres and that place where new and foreign agents first appear.

In this way, my practice combines familiar depictions with abstract marks that are less clearly definable. The approach is a deliberately destabilising one and attempts to undermine processes of figurative representation. It serves not only to undo the dichotomy of abstract and figurative painting, but to place the viewer in an ambiguous relation with that representation.