Selected Exhibitions
2023 - National Portrait Gallery, London. Reopening of the gallery after a three year refurbishment project
2022 - Chippenham Museum
2021 - Royal Academy Summer Exhibition
2020 - Waterfront Gallery - Wales Contemporary
2019 - RA Summer Exhibition
Pre 2019 - Art London / Blackheath Gallery / Tallantyre / CFA Eton / AAF London / Art Ireland / Victoria Gallery Bath / Limetree Gallery
Collections
National Portrait Gallery, London
Chippenham Museum
Standard Chartered Bank
And also…
If I can group myself as part of a generation that grew up before the internet, and yet also one coming to terms with the fact that it will be the dominating cultural influence on our lives, I seem to find a context for many of the choices I make as an artist. Choices made not out of any deep analysis or understanding of the concepts driving this upheaval, but because of an awareness that things are different now. The experience of living is different, and in a way that I don’t think we understand yet. Choices that consciously - and sometime I think unconsciously - express my feelings about this strange fracture in our lives. We’re living through an era divided by a ‘before and after’ effect that I presume happens to all people who have lived through wars and pandemics and other catastrophes, but this particular change is seen as progress, and has been for the most part embraced and accepted in to our lives as a good thing. To me it feels like a disquieting and unnerving time. Perhaps more so because the memories of youth and childhood that are still fresh to me and others of this generation, seem to now exist in not just our own past but in another context. A context where a linear view of history has been replaced by one where everything seems to exists at once. A flattening effect of the internet and the overwhelming information bombardment we suffer because of it.
But it’s these memories, and their relationships with everyday life that I hold most important in making work. I see things that interest me all around, every day, though I usually need to find a visual hook to take something further. I’ll maybe see one thing during the day, anything at all, that triggers a memory of something quite specific, and that in combination with the cue leads off somewhere new. It’s only a start, but the idea sticks around as the work transforms around it.
So many of the ‘cues’ come from a screen these days. TV news, social media accounts, film and the web in general, all act as stimulants. I’m also drawn to certain writers, and I find our histories fascinating and inspiring in a melancholic kind of way. Other than that I’m inspired by being alive, and the beauty of nature and other people, which really could be enough on their own.
