Pepys II Painting

My practice investigates the dystopian reality of living on one of London’s roughest housing estates – The Pepys estate in Deptford. Using archive and my own photography I create collages to recreate my memories of living there, which are then translated into oil paintings. Emergent themes include loneliness, security, isolation and violence. The collaged images fuel my imagination and the works are built up in layers with a highly detailed under-painting, which is then gradually eroded with paint in an exploratory process. My goal is to create an entropic surface that highlights the dysfunctional predicament we lived in – it was and still is urban decay. The notion of figuration vs. abstraction has also emerged as a central construct of my work where I allow certain subjects to be represented whilst the context and background is allowed to disintegrate and do its own thing – open to accident and chance.