PF: Who or what has influenced your work the most?
A constellation of things: spending a lot of time exploring the woods at a very formative age, being in a community with a rich oral storytelling tradition, and an obsession with oil paint. At university I spent a lot of time reading poetry, and wrote a dissertation on Dart by Alice Oswald, a book length poem made up of a tapestry of voices, human, mythic and organic. I grew up by the Dart and this way of understanding place as porous, with history just beneath the surface and the non-human bursting at the seams of our interventions has massively influenced my work.
PF: Walk us through your creative process?
I always try and read a chapter to start my day in the studio, at the moment it’s ‘The Nude: a Study in Ideal Form’ by Kennith Clark and ‘Medieval Life and Leisure in the Devonshire Hunting Tapestries’ by Linda Woolley. I am often layering art history and artefacts in my work and want to grow my visual library as much a possible. The painting process is fast and slow - I’ll always have multiple boards and canvases on the go - layering colour and texture, sometimes works will sit for months or years in a corner and then suddenly I can see the next layer. I often start with a plan that always flies out the window as soon as a work is started, I am learning to be more open to the intervention the painting makes in the process, it will tell me what it wants if I give it time.
PF: What do you want people to feel or take away from your art?
That the world is strange and slippery, that the past and our sense of history is an illusion made of fragments, half-glimpsed and unknowable.
PF: If you could have dinner with any artist who would it be?
An almost impossible question to answer! Stuck between Paula Rego, Caravaggio and Ana Mendieta…. Perhaps all three but it would probably be carnage.