Artist's Statement:

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"At the scene of a car crash, many drivers will slow down to observe the aftermath —but I’ve never had the stomach to look. However, it’s not possible to escape the relentless onslaught of social and mass media messaging.  In a Western culture seemingly obsessed with disasters and brutality, I often feel that I am expected to hear about genocide, murder, rape —to look at car crashes – and somehow carry on with my life, unaffected. I like to think that much of my work is my way of dealing with the trauma of listening to the news every day; whether it's simply trying to make something beautiful as a distraction, or exploring the tension between beauty and violence.

 

Underworld Dreams is an expression of the spaces we inhabit when the mind disassociates from the body; whether it be through dreaming, a trauma response, or simply being lost in thought. It’s a clumsy rendition of the fragmentation of time and thoughts, and places I have no words for. The process of making these pieces originated from the idea of illustrating dreamscapes. Due to the nature of the content, I worked intuitively, with every new painting drifting further and further into abstraction."