Dirty Girls Painting

I love the sensuality of paint and the magic of creation, using acrylic paint on board or paper for a sense of immediacy. My paintings burst from the canvas and spill over the edges; they spit, are spiky; they are about our secret parts, desires, longings. They have been described as ‘voluptuous’ and ‘visceral’. They are dark, rich and often humorous... above all, human. My work often references classical, biblical and folk-tale imagery. The roughness and incompleteness of the paint confronts the conventions of visual depiction and the fragility of our existence in concrete reality and time. For the past few years I’ve been exploring the politics of identity, gender and labelling through the concept of BEASTLINESS. If something is rough or ugly, is it a beast? By labelling something ‘beast’, do we make it beastly? Human beings are vulnerable creatures of flesh and blood, but we can also be rough, wild and capable of more creativity and cruelty than any other animal. We dance around a triangle of tenderness, brutality and passion and this is what my work is about.