STILL-LIFE
But I’m not really interested in painting flowers as botanical subjects. I rarely work directly from observation. Instead, the paintings evolve intuitively, through colour, gesture and memory, allowing the experience of painting itself to determine what remains. A flower might be suggested by a few marks; a stem by a single line. I’m interested in how little information is needed before something becomes recognisable, and in the space between observation and abstraction.
I Just Float (detail) 2024 oil on canvas
Blue Moon (detail) 2026 oil on canvas
Where my abstract paintings are predominantly environmental - responding to my experience of colour, landscape, weather, light and the material world - the still lifes are more relational. They process something of my experience of being a woman in relation to other people: love, family, friendship, motherhood, loss, conversations, music, memory and the accumulated emotional energy of everyday life.
The vessel has become increasingly significant within this. It is a container: a place for all that experience to land. Above it, flowers and foliage are free to jostle, bloom, collide, droop, reach and escape. They can be exuberant or quiet, unruly or contained, sometimes all of those things at once.
I think of these paintings as strongly feminine rather than decorative. They hold something of the complexity, energy and contradiction of lived experience - translated through colour, movement and paint.
