“I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.”
(William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying)
My work begins in motion: hunting, praying, grieving, scoring, stroking, begging, playing. Unleashing and hoping, always searching. I revolve the canvas in slow 360-degree rotations as if circling a question that can never be answered. Painting is not linear for me; it is a constant returning to the same point from a slightly altered place in time.
Painting is a kind of slow time and a way of thinking. A portal into ancestral and future space at once. I move between myth, memory and imagination. I paint to listen, to feel connection to something greater, to empty out and fill again, to step into that looping thread of time where past and present knot together.
Colour arrives first: urgent, insistent, alive. In my practice, colour chases colour with an ecstatic violence, one hue hurling itself toward another, collapsing, swelling, recoiling. My task is to follow their momentum, the turbulence of their meeting. Alongside that force exists its opposite: slowness, sensitivity, a near ritual tenderness. Each mark becomes a combustion or a whisper.
Each painting becomes an artefact of time. I lay down layers like strata, allowing them to cure, breathe and shift. The surface thickens with decisions, erasures, hesitations. This cannot be rushed. The integrity of the work lives in duration, in the way time presses itself into paint like sediment. What you see is not a single moment but many, living through one another.
My own history carries its own strata. A Welsh mother descended from coal miners walking the land in search of survival. A father whose family escaped Nazi Germany and rebuilt their lives in London. These stories hold weight and leave residues; their shadows travel through generations in ways not always spoken. Addiction and neglect shaped parts of my early landscape, and painting became a place to transform that heaviness without depicting it directly, turning inherited stories into colour, form, pulse.
Motherhood deepened this sense of thresholds. The womb as cave, darkness, beginning. A place of safety and terror and creation. Painting often feels like entering that chamber again, where something unknown waits to be made.
In the studio I often feel the presence of Rhiannon from the Mabinogion, the medieval Welsh cycle of mythic tales where the boundaries between worlds are thin. She appears not as an image but as an inspiring force, carrying the quiet strength of her first arrival on the otherworldly horse no one could ever reach. She reminds me that creation is transformation, that stories shift shape to endure. At times I sense her guiding the work, urging me to trust what moves beneath the surface. Her journey through blame, loss and renewal echoes through the studio as a steady undercurrent. When I paint, I feel her beside me, drawing me toward the threshold.
My paintings come from the feeling of myth, the sense of standing at an opening between worlds. Each work is an artefact of crossing, a movement from wound to image, from chaos to fragile order.