Paintings 2012-2017
April 4th 2012, I bought a one-way ticket to London with a vague plan to get a live/work studio space in East London somewhere, after having visited artist friends in Hackney Wick who had since moved away. I didn’t know anyone! 4 days later I took a space in a unit in The Old Peanut Factory and ended up staying put for the next 5 years.
It was a transformative experience on many levels, the first time in my life I was around other artists, I had 1 housemate doing an MA in Goldsmiths while another was doing an MA at the RCA. Engaging with other artists at this level really helped me to develop my work and question my practice in new years. Within a couple of years I had also developed a new pathway in live visual performance and 3D motion design with the live events space.
In 2014 I had a solo show at Stour Space Gallery in Hackney Wick and it was the biggest exhibition space I’d ever shown in! The work included paintings that went back quite a way but most of it was from 2013 and 2014. I was exploring novel ways to abstract patterns from nature and made some pieces that used the patterns of unwrapped plywood as a paint-by-numbers starting point for new work. I was also making pieces on photography paper, which starts it’s life out as a shiny turquoise/blue but eventually bleaches to a dull light grey thanks to the silver-nitrate reacting to the Sun’s radiation and changing colour permanently.
The following few years were heavily taken up by many live visual performance projects at festivals like Boomtown, Noisily and Secret Garden Party. You can see in my work how I was trying to find ways to bring my digital skills into my ‘painting’ practice. I’m definitely happy I made a start exploring these avenues but it definitely isn’t a great replacement for the physical work. Translating between the physical, digital and back again, and repeating that in new ways sparked a research project that is still on going, involving projecting images of paintings back onto themselves with new distortions and colour changes, and converting images to 3D objects with depth and then physically printing them to paint back onto.
