"We know what we are, not what we may be.." - William Shakespeare

I view the practice of painting and the practice of being an artist, a ‘work in progress’. In fact, I view the simple fact of being a human being as a ‘work in progress’.

My interest in encapsulating my own narrative is directly confronted in this work. In retrospect I believe a lot of my artwork to be a form of self portrait, each piece is integral to my own understanding and development.

Using gold and silver leafing I have embedded each portrait in an overly abstracted 'landscape'. There is no clear beginning and no clear end, just interactions and intrinsic associations of past and present.

More often than not I don't know what I am going to create when I start a painting - most references do not come until much later in the process; this allows me to rely on intuition and a live response to my own physical and emotional body.

In the beginning, the portraits were traditionally drawn however the more time I spent, the more faded and unidentifiable they became. The surface is disrupted by arbitrary marks that are informed by the underlined drawings, helping me navigate the painting.

It's important to me that a painting is not immediate, just as the process is not.

It is a time capsule, not a definitive or permanent state, just fragments and layers that have been built up and broken down to uncover our story, explore our minds and to unravel what was there before and what is becoming.