Oil on Canvas
51 x 41cm    
 
My paintings begin in performance. I construct masks, costumes and props from reproductions of paintings, domestic objects, cheap jewelry, and found images that already carry social or devotional meaning. I photograph myself inside these provisional figures, then rebuild the encounter in oil.

I have learned, in my queerness, to recognise myself obliquely in bodies and images not made for me. That desire to become someone or something else that I cannot be runs through the practice. Sometimes I inhabit the image of a beautiful woman; elsewhere it may be a saint, king, or monster.

I grew up in a working-class Christadelphian family in Worcester, surrounded by religious reproductions, cheap ornaments, and Victorian prints. Renouncing that faith left the need for belief intact. I began to rebuild it through vernacular images, finding within their awkwardness, glamour, and familiarity forms of reverence and longing. In the ordinary, I search for a door to the divine.

The paintings preserve what remains after an invented ceremony.I am drawn to transformation almost working while the body, object or source image shows through. I like that failure. It can be comic, painful or ecstatic. I return to the point where a mask reveals rather than conceals, and where borrowed things become temporary bodies through which another hidden theatre of self appears briefly, before receding once more into the material fact of painting.  
 
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