The Eat Me Painting

I was born in Sutton Coldfield in 1974 and currently live in Manchester. I currently also work as an Art Psychotherapist with emotionally damaged adolescents, and much of my painting is informed by the experiences of the journeys with these children.

My art is a sustained attempt to restore to our culture a sense of the sacred. The way in which I communicate this belief in my work is by creating images which are intended to provoke spiritual contemplation and meditation. The main themes of my work are the relationship between love and suffering /death, apparent opposites that remain a constant theme.

My recent work is concerned with the struggle to capture the relationship between the spirit and the flesh, incongruous subjects that are expressed in my work through the conflict of high religious themes with sensuous painterly marks. I look to the tradition of great religious painting throughout art history, and often reference particular images through my work. This is done in a way that plays between the borders of figuration and abstraction, and hopefully presents the audience with new possibilities of viewing the work. Paintings are often stained or blurred to create the effect of an image viewed through the faded layers of time and history and to further disrupt the literalness of what is depicted.