I am a self-taught artist working with nature and landscapes, but the most fascinating spaces to me are the ones that are hardest to occupy. It is only through using my imagination that a distant memory, a feeling or a faraway uninhabitable place can become gradually accessible.  This becomes the motive for picking up my tools. When exploring these spaces, I derive a strange sort of pleasurable regret that I will never be able to fully experience or embody them.
Both photography and painting are the most appropriate modes for conveying this sensation, with other mediums such as sculpture and performance seeping their way in. Though each medium wields its own outcome, all of my work is created through intuitive and unplanned actions. Photography causes me to observe the spaces around me, whereas painting drives me to search within.

When I take a photo, I am probing and documenting because I’m curious of what lies beyond physical and perceived boundaries. Using a camera allows for a method of looking that is more complex and spontaneous than painting. I take a photo when I feel the need to raise a question, but I cannot ask it. It brings up intense feelings of detachment and the photographs become a way into an unfamiliar world.

However, when I paint, I am escaping and speculating, building an imagined world which stems from a curiosity of the natural world and is often backed by scientific research of distant parts of our universe. I like the unpredictability of paint because it can pull me closer to my destination and unlocking its narrative. Achieving an imitation of nature is not as important as translating a personal experience. This results in layers of disordered brushwork and structuring contours which symbolise the event in my mind. This is particularly true of my exploration of the Venus, which has become more than just a planet that I will never step foot on. For something that is so disparate from Earth, it feels astonishingly familiar. To me, the reflective clouds that conceal its inhospitable and chaotic surface act like a veil shielding pain and ugliness.

But beauty plays its part. I am aware of my previous experience as a makeup artist and my compulsion to make things appear beautiful and balanced. I find symbolic links with the natural environment that resonate with the relentless pursuit of perfection and wholeness. My processes help me to convey beauty as one part of a whole concept.