Grotesque, sad and noble, the octopus has a feeling brain in every tentacle.
These works come from a different place, a more interior place. Whilst ‘Edges’ considers the world as divided by boundaries, in these Octopus works the female protagonist, with eyes closed, appears to soar above it.
EM 2024
Paintings and drawings 2023/24
There had been snowfall….I had the sense that a presence of some kind might be just imaginable. There may be ghosts of the dancers and the piper of the Stranger paintings.
I turned to the radio for companionship, but found there a chaotic, non-sensical world which mirrored my own situation.
EM 2024
Paintings 2022/23
“As I walked in the May woods near my home, I thought of the Wodewose and the Green Man. I remembered an essay by the sociologist Georg Simmel, The Stranger. It set me thinking about the nature of community and the relationship between being attached to and being apart from it; conformity and freedom. The community that began to form in my mind was the village, a quintessential English village. But the stranger who kept coming into my mind was German: the Pied Piper whose story is so ambivalent.” More
EM 2023
Paintings 2021
“These paintings revisit The Family Wood (2018). The family is back in the wood, its members are going about their tasks. It's a winter wood, so less accommodating and more reflective. It is a family like my own birth family, with a son and a daughter, of a similar era to my own. The painting titles are both nouns and verbs: Dwelling, Being, Clearing, Building, reflecting Heidegger's ideas about the intrinsic 'making' nature of human beings.”
EM 2021
Paintings 2020
“Where I grew up there was a hill called Woose Hill, allegedly the home of the Woose (seen in Woose at Embrook 2015). A Wodewose is a wild man of the woods, in northern European folklore.”
Paintings 2018/19
“In other paintings, characters from the reading schemes of my childhood take journeys into places unfamiliar and sometimes unsafe. Like characters from Pilgrim's Progress, the nuclear family who walked through the Forest of Doubt in a painting of 2017, emerge in 'The Way' into the meadow of certainty.”
EM 2019
Into the Meadow of Certainty
Poolside Barbecue (works on paper)
Paintings 2018/19
“Many of my characters precariously inhabit a world on the edge of the woods, on the edge of their own animal, wild selves and on the edge of the more unruly aspects of their minds.”
EM 2019
Into the Meadow of Certainty
Poolside Barbecue (works on paper)
Paintings 2017
“Last summer I dreamt of a man with a felt mask. It was vivid, it was violent and the message from my unconscious was very clear. I was reminded of another vivid dream of 40 years ago - of a boy in a green jumper, which had been a similarly powerful message from my unconscious.”
EM 2016
A Cold Wind From The Mountains
A Cold Wind From The Mountains works on paper
A Cold Wind From The Mountains exhibibion text
Paintings 2015
“The murder of Sharon Tate by The Family in August 1969 was one of the first truly frightening events I can recall. I remember trying to banish the image of Charles Manson’s face, looking madly out from my parents’ newspaper, from my mind as I went to sleep.”
EM 2015
Limerence
Paintings and works on paper 2014/19
“Collages and drawings fracture and deconstruct the world of the Disney princess, rendering her limerent, entranced and vulnerable on the one hand and armed with a machine gun on the other.”
EM 2019
Paintings 2013/14
“Mariana has lost her love because of the loss of her dowry and she makes no escape but spends her time waiting and hoping, looking for her lovers’ return. I wanted to use the sexuality already present in Millais’ painting and let Mariana take it a little further.…it is also a painting which tries to explore the un-grounded and visceral feelings of passion through paint.”
EM 2014
The Gift of Shit
A Coruscating Eye exhibition text by Nicky Hodge
Paintings 2013/14
“In fact I came to think that these women were often considered ‘difficult’ and so they may have been. They would not have had the support networks to ease the sharp edges that came with their creativity. Bette Davis said that if a man speaks his mind he’s a strong character; if a woman does, she’s a bitch.”
EM 2013
Absent Friends
Text from ‘Picturing People’ by Charlotte Mullins
Paintings 2012/13
“I was interested in the English 'folkish' in general, particularly as it manifested in early photography…I believe they come out of a custom whereby unemployed farm labourers would perform for the wealthy in their district in mid-winter, and extort money. So there was a threatening aspect to it. I was thinking of our own Occupy movement at the time of painting them.”
EM 2013
Bones in the River
The Hungry Ghosts
A Cold Wind From The Mountains works on paper
Paintings 2010
“But the assault is also in the story, the breaking of the mirror, the breaking down of the inside/outside divide of tower and world, body and world. The assault of feeling.”
EM 2010
The Ladies of Shalott
The Ladies of Shalott text by Jonathan Griffin
Paintings 2009/10
“The Waiting Room (Wartezimmer) is Freud’s consultation room. Freud the patriarch and ‘father of psychoanalysis’ who tried to take the lid off the repressive Austrian society. It is also the basement where Fritzl (the bad father) kept his daughter. But it also refers to a more personal sense of limbo or waiting that I have always felt about my own life (waiting for permission to get on with it) which seems to be the inheritance of a 19th century attitude to women still pervasive as I grew up.”
EM 2010
Paintings 2008/10
“But they are always corruptions of their starting points. Prince (tilted) is inspired by Slovakian puppets, but also refers to another motif I use, The Hapsburg Hat. This was a felt hat I bought for a partner, which reminded me of hunting hats worn by the Austro-Hungarian Emperor, Franz Josef."
EM 2008
Paintings 2007/09
“My painted Queens are based on women who have ruled in their own right. They have discovered an autonomy, although this is always with the aid of an attribute which symbolises the absent masculine. In the case of the Singing Queens, this attribute is the voice.”
EM 2008
Paintings 2006/7
“None of these paintings depict my grandmother’s actual house; most use as a model the paintings of the Victorian painter, Helen Allingham. In reality the cottage, like the grandmother, like, indeed, ‘the feminine’, can be both stifling and nurturing, both enchanting and repellent. The cottage is a motif central to cultural identity because, I would argue, of this relationship with the maternal.”
EM 2007