About
I was raised in Scotland during the miners’ strikes, in an atmosphere shaped by division — religious, political, and domestic. I grew up surrounded by fragmented but potent family history and the folklore of the place: stories of witchcraft, gypsy lore, superstition, and half-told truths. Those early experiences seep into the work.
My painting practice is built around tension and duality: what is shown and what is withheld, what is remembered and what is invented, what is said and what is implied. I’m fascinated by the way a painting becomes a third presence in a relationship — something that sits between the painter and the viewer, carrying its own version of a story. I think often about how narratives are formed, how they shift depending on who is looking, and how uncertain “truth” can feel when memory, loyalty, and inheritance are involved.
I’m interested in the static in relationships: the unsaid, the tension under the surface, the way control can operate quietly through tradition, belief, or ritual. Religious symbolism appears in my paintings as a visual language of authority, obedience, and containment.
I work primarily in oil on panel and linen. Rather than depicting events directly, I use domestic iconography to think about relationships, inheritance, and the ways memory is held and transmitted. Familiar household objects — wallpaper, fabric, toys — appear as static icons. They act as surfaces onto which meaning is projected, stored, and distorted. Pattern, repetition, veiling, and partial legibility function both as decoration and obstruction, mirroring the way family histories are passed down incompletely: through fragments, textures, and rituals of care.
My paintings draw on the visual logic of votive images and reliquaries, not as devotional objects, but as systems for keeping something in place. Across the work, the domestic interior becomes a secular shrine — a site where tenderness and coercion, comfort and unease, are inseparable. I’m drawn to the way objects outlive the people who used them, and how they continue to carry trace, burden, and expectation. Even when their original context has gone, they quietly shape the present.
I studied at Glasgow School of Art, and I have returned to painting with a sustained interest in observation, memory, and relational experience. The work aims to hold tension without resolving it, allowing narratives to remain open, unsettled, and unfinished
