Artist Statement

My practice is currently divided into two interconnected strands. The first explores masculinity, aggression, vulnerability, and the complex ways these qualities are learned, inherited, and expressed. Drawing on personal experiences, childhood memories, dreams, mythology, and religious imagery, I examine the tensions between violence and tenderness, control and instinct, fear and affection. I am interested in how familiar narratives and symbols can be reinterpreted through a personal lens, revealing connections between individual experience and broader ideas of male identity and inherited behaviour.

These works typically take the form of larger-scale paintings, allowing me to explore these themes with greater physical and psychological intensity. The second strand consists primarily of smaller portraits, which serve as a space for formal experimentation rather than being driven by a specific conceptual framework. These paintings allow me to investigate the possibilities of expressive mark-making, abstraction, layering, and distortion. I work from photographs shared by artists in the Cane-Yo Telegram group, where members upload images of themselves for others to use as reference material, it’s a really good resource. The process of painting these portraits has become an important means of developing my visual language, with discoveries made in these smaller works feeding back into my larger, more conceptually driven paintings.

Across both strands, I am increasingly interested in the relationship between the physical act of painting and the emotional presence of the subject. Through the interplay of expressive marks, disrupted forms, and shifting degrees of clarity and obscurity, I seek to create images that resist easy resolution. I want the material qualities of paint to carry as much psychological weight as the subject itself, producing work that feels unsettled, ambiguous, and emotionally complex.