Artist Statement

My painting is a visual journey back and forth between internal and external landscapes. I am drawn to the natural landscape - not the topographical elements, or ‘views’ in a moment of time, but rather the wider experience of belonging and loss within a place. My artistic language and internal landscapes are derived from culturally borrowed decorative objects of my childhood in Hong Kong where Chinese scroll painting as well as indigo dyed textiles formed the visual world in which I grew up. My external landscapes are the rural idyll of Wiltshire where I live: beautiful, eroding, fragile.

I see the natural world through the lens of this oscillation, a memorialisation of belonging and loss; a type of visual archaeology where memories are embedded in layers of paint, fabrics and intuitive mark making. Ecological chaos and ruination have become the context of my landscapes and I see these symbols of remembrance, personal ancestry, cultural inheritance and collective grief in my surroundings as expressions of my own internal and external landscapes. I see the Earth as tapestries of spent being: ruined and rebirthed, interconnected with our collective and personal grief forming kin with place, our fellow humans and the more than humans with whom we share our lives and deaths. 

I work on canvas, paint and quilted heirloom fabrics of my childhood and I handle my materials roughly, working in many thick and thin layers that are then scrubbed, sanded, scorched and scraped back and then harmonised to reveal an analogous history of the layers of time, experience and memories. I am interested in the visual language of ruination and grief where beauty and devastation become entangled, creating imagery that refers simultaneously to antiquity and the contemporary.