Sifting for Life Through the Sands of Mars Painting

Within my practice, I have developed an obsession with space and absence. I force images of places and things that are familiar to become ambiguous and fluid, detached and without association. A lack of attachment and familiarity allows me to exercise a freedom that I cannot find when recreating what is around me. Different versions of the real world are forced together to become a false world, an imagined space. Familiar drawn and collaged elements transcend into an ambiguous chaos confined within the four sides of the surface. The only clear reflections of the original imagery remain attached to the paintings through the titles which emerge from elements of text accompanying the source images or are literal descriptions of it. Disjointed and peculiar amorphous shapes, like limbs appear through the work. They are separate from their human owners; legs and hand shapes are left stranded floating in the air, and grim faces appear through the stained and rubbed surface. The act of removing paint from the surface has provided artificial spaces within the frame of the canvas. These areas of space stained by the erased paint replicate the sense of removal and absence that I have become obsessed with. They form their own fragments, revealing the history of the painting, and provoking a sense of time which does not exist.