A Room Laced With Black Dog Cruelty is an active working out of the lingering effects of grief. Grief is persistent and insidious, it sits amidst the shadows of a room eager to take reign over stillness at any given time.
Through my practice, I seek to give physical form to internal emotions. The compulsion to express myself derives from my first-hand experience of grief. Living with the reality of my artist-father's premature death during my childhood, my life experiences since then have been coloured by his absence. I find that both my father's life and my own are intricately entwined and unsettlingly aligned.
I work in a multi-disciplinary manner, embracing traditional printmaking and painting/ drawing techniques. This fusion allows for a looseness of application to the work's surface and permits a freedom from the conscious in the act of creation.
Amidst Flesh & Blood, dark-field monotype, 96 x 68cm
Head of Dionysus, oil on canvas, 23 x 30cm
Head of Dionysus (detail)
Black Dog, carborundum, 21 x 27cm
Poor Lazarus, dark-field monotype, 45 x 62cm
Scald My Skin, oil on canvas, 100 x 120cm
Scald My Skin, oil on canvas, 100 x 120cm
The Fool, patinated cast bronze on granite, 20cm
Blackbird Familiarity, carborundum, 30 x 40cm
Drypoints I, II & III, drypoint etching, 22 x 30cm; 26 x 38cm; 22 x 28cm