The core of my current work is concerned with expanding the boundaries of painting. Although rooted in the tradition of painting my practice is broad and fluid, my exploration of the language and processes of painting can lead at times to working with film, installation, performance and events.
I am interested in the capabilities of paint, from a coloured stain to a lavish impasto mark, the layers, physical and illusional, the way movement can be solidified and structure dissolved. My subjects range from, seasonal light between buildings, cars artificially illuminating a grey motorway, to the sun creating monochrome patterns in a saturated landscape. Some paintings take root in the original subject, many move away, layers of complex colour creating a sense of visual, and physical depth, stacking up, like in a suitcase, moving from one place to the next, unloading and repacking, exploring the potential of each destination. Each painting, or layer of paint, becomes a catalyst for the next. It is a concoction of the whole process, the clash of subject and substance, the image transformed through intense observation, and momentary incidents of paint.
My experiments with film and installation, have grown out of the painting process. I am interested in ways of breaking the image out of the surface, using film as a layer in the painted image, I want the viewer to experience what it feels like to step inside the illusion, to witness the transformation.
I used this process inspired by the Matte painting tradition of the film industry to create 'Wake' (Fairfield G.I 2010) a video of rough sea and a struggling ship was projected onto a cinematic scale painted backcloth of a seascape, interweaving the static and moving image.
In 'Threads' film was projected onto wool strung out randomly, creating walkways enabling the viewer to become part of the layers of colour and light.
'Tracers' sited in the Govan shipyards was a multi layered work which responded to the history of the building, working with archive footage projected onto glass, I attempted to trace the shapes and movement of the film, in white pen, a mass of scribbles were built up , the result was an up ended kind of grafitti. The presence of the marks revealing the film.
Much of my work is characterised by this sense of the paradoxical, things turn inside out or back to front, objects turn to voids, trees become lines of space, a distant mist becomes a lump of paint.