*Text written by the artist

I recently read an interview with the brilliant photographer, Dorothy Bohm. In it she describes attempting to capture ‘poetic, mysterious, transitional moments.’ This resonates very much. 

I’m a classically trained painter who now makes largely abstract works, informed by a love for the alchemy of paint and for sacred art across the ages. My works oscillate between minimalism and expressionism, with a spiritual undercurrent drawn from personal experience. My work is about essence. I’m trying to create a language for myself that can speak where words fail, or at least, to signpost experiences of heightened illumination. 

With the ‘Spirit Matter’ series, I paint in reverse. The canvas is dyed with a dark black or indigo. I then bleach parts of the surface to reveal lighter areas. The process happens slowly, in many layers, as I attempt to encourage an ethereal light into the artwork. The result is hopefully open-ended and suggestive of a numinous experience. The paintings are not depictions of Spirit — how can one represent the invisible? — but evocations and echos, a vapour. They point towards a presence that you catch out of the corner of your eye, just before it slips away. 

These works were made in my Edinburgh studio and then during a residency at NIROX Foundation in the Cradle of Humankind (July – August 2022). The incredible space at NIROX opened new possibilities in the work, both in technique and scale. The paintings appear simultaneously as portals and as veils. They stem from an instinct for a kind of light that I have felt all of my life.”