"Down the Rabid Hole" Painting

Born 1982, Worcester, I studied art and gained a BA(hons) at Newcastle University and an MA (Distinction) Fine Art at Northumbria University.
I have since continued to exhibit in group and solo exhibitions, with exhibitions across the UK and Europe, and collections held in the UK, Norway, Japan, Denmark, France and Brazil.
I am a contemporary painter based in North East England, working at the intersection of abstraction, figuration, and visual noise. My practice is rooted in the shifting surfaces of urban environments, places where marks are made, fade, and are replaced, reflecting the transient nature of experience as we move through towns and cities. I am interested in how these surfaces act as informal archives of human presence, constantly rewritten through time, weather, and interaction.
I build my paintings through layers of gesture, text, and fragmented imagery, drawing on the constant collision between what we see and what we think. Snatches of overheard conversation, fragments of news, and the persistent presence of social media all feed into the work. These influences are not directly illustrated but absorbed, processed, and reconfigured into a visual language that feels both familiar and unstable. I am particularly interested in how information is internalised and distorted, how meaning shifts depending on context, and how memory edits itself over time.
The act of walking plays a central role in my practice. Moving through towns and cities, I collect visual and sensory information, signage, graffiti, advertisements, discarded objects, and passing interactions. These moments accumulate and overlap, forming a dense mental landscape that informs the paintings. What is seen in a split second can resurface later in a different form, layered with other experiences and thoughts. The work becomes a space where these fragments coexist, often in tension with one another.
My process is intuitive and iterative, grounded in cycles of addition and erasure. I allow forms to emerge and then disrupt them, painting over, scraping back, and redrawing in order to create depth and complexity. This continual reworking mirrors the way thoughts evolve, where ideas are formed, challenged, and replaced. The surface of each painting holds traces of these decisions, revealing a history of making that is never fully resolved.
I am drawn to the balance between control and spontaneity.