I am a painter, a material creator.
It is only ourselves which we can truly hope to know, the lives of others are secret, clouded by the mist of individuality. However, by painting my life in pictures of events, culture, shared identities and spaces I hope to communicate the reality of our common connection as pieces of the universe.

I live and work in Glasgow which is a wobbly city. There is a wet current here, a watery magical aliveness, no solid ground, no base. I find the richness of the music scene, the mismatched architecture, and the chaos of the culture and weather to be soapy, difficult to grasp but cleansing, carvable, muse like.

The objects which I make are fine decoration, refined craft, labour manifest. The separation of decoration and fine art is a dirty one, defined by class, cultural context, gender and power. I am a maker and a craftsman. There is a straightness, a greyness, a repetitive repetition of flat lines and black squares seeping into our world. Industry has aged into imaginative laziness, the public has been drained of pigment. I’m painting back some colour.

In our world most objects are not made to be used, but are made to be sold. The end (profit) does not justify the means, because money was never an end, just a means. I make paintings so they can exist, not so they can be bought.

Paintings are information gateways, still but ever-changing worlds. They are a kind of artifice, the illusion is that there is a world in that little painted window. However, our reality is more artificial than we often remember. In the same way that I can create a world on a piece of plywood, cities are built and formed by men. A painting is a reminder that the imagined and the real are not so different planes, all things made were once just electric ideation. Straight lines are a human invention. Paint fills the gaps between living and dreaming. 

It is easy to spend our attention unconsciously these days, on advertising and short-form content, unconsensual emotion, hormones firing directionless, without our involvement. Paintings are a resistance to this, infinite adventures into what might seem mundane, states changing with the emotizone of the viewer.