Coffee and Cigarettes Painting

Painting is an essential part of my being; a painting to me is not only an image but a physical material object, which embodies traces of its process of production. My abstract work is material-based and process-led: it explores the notion of layering from both a conceptual and material standpoint. My painting process is a cathartic dialogue with the materials, which involves building and unearthing translucent coatings of oil paint and varnish onto plywood, paper and canvas. The resulting paintings are a trace of that dialogue. Through painting, I am the cartographer of a journey through an internal, perhaps imagined, landscape; where each painting acts as a section of an extended landscape that could perhaps exist beyond the frame. The work is playful and colourful, explosive and pensive; poetically confrontational shapes flow between each other, like the meeting of two or more worlds, folding and colliding. My painting practice is influenced by my intimate one-to-one performance art work, which involves sensory drawing as a performative act, as well as by my fascination with cartography. I am interested in how mark-making can be used as a way to map layers of subjectivities in relation to space, place and the body. My current project “Unmapping” is both inspired by and acts as an inspiration for my painting practice. It involves leading workshops on collaborative drawing and using participatory cartography as a tool for mining stories and memories to capture abstract images of personal or imagined geographies.