Artist’s Statement

I am a self-taught artist.

I use conventional ‘art’ materials. I also use less conventional materials: the discarded, the forgotten, the broken and the lost.

My use of mixed media has developed from a lack of ‘proper’ art materials, coupled with an initial reluctance toward using such materials. I began to source materials from my surroundings and locations relevant to my work, recycling items discarded by other people and incorporating them into my art.

By using materials that have experienced time in the real world, rather than having been produced merely for the purposes of making art, a sense of the raw and the living is brought to my work.

Of the variety of mixed media I use, puzzle pieces feature regularly. They have both aesthetic and practical use in my work, whilst also appealing to my sense of displacement in the world, despite knowing I am intrinsically connected to it – forever part of a far bigger picture.

I consider the puzzle piece an iconic emblem that goes some way to defining the idea that we each search for the missing pieces within ourselves, and that I am pieces of your puzzle, you are pieces of mine, and together we are pieces of a singular consciousness, Nature – a puzzle which is continually reestablishing itself. We are the culmination of time past and experience felt, collective elements of wide variety, and so any illusion of individuality is true only in the sense each of us are an ever changing cocktail of our pasts, presents and indistinct futures.

My art is not abstract. My art is reactionary. My art is an expression.