Stone Offering
Acrylic on canvass, 1000mm x 1000mm
A quiet geometry of memory and gesture; a fragment of time, held still in form.
This painting draws on both architectural memory and symbolic form. At its centre, I shaped a pale vessel that floats in shallow relief — abstracted, undulant, part-object, part-apparition. Above it, a round disc hovers like a moon, watched over by a cloud-like form that shifts between sky and spirit.
Below lies a field of deep red — an altar, a plinth, perhaps a table for rites — cut with five curved triangular forms. They echo the small Saxon niche in St Mary’s Church at Deerhurst, near Tewkesbury: early Christian in origin, their rhythm has become devotional here, almost musical. They mark a threshold — a memory held in stone.
The vessel also appears in a separate sculptural work, weathered and scored with time, but in this painting it becomes still — spectral, suspended in a field of lime and silence. These forms speak of sanctuaries and of a language older than words. The composition is stripped and contemplative, inviting reflection rather than narrative.
Witness Zero
Acrylic & studio dust on canvass, 1000mm x 1000mm
Axis of perception — origin of the gaze — a sentinel at the threshold of becoming.
A figure emerges from a field of pale turbulence, neither celestial nor human, but marked with the traces of both. The face, netted in a dark veil of latticework, confronts the viewer with direct, unsparin
g eyes — gaze unblinking, lips sharply defined in crimson. The mesh is both adornment and barrier, suggesting containment, perhaps control, yet the radiating shafts from the halo-like arc behind the head, counter with an assertion of force or illumination.
The figure’s torso is mapped with anatomical lines and splinters of red — gesturing toward circuitry, suffering, or ritual incision. Wing-like forms flank the shoulders but remain ambiguous: prosthetic, divine, fractured, protective? The whole composition oscillates between icon and interface, memory and machine.
Painted in dry, unsettled tones — greys, mauves, ashes, rust — the background echoes the liminality of the figure: a being suspended in a state between exposure and concealment, vulnerability and authority. This is a portrait of an entity, not fixed in identity, but held in tension — watched and watching, wounded and radiant.
Vestibule Figures
Pencil, chalk & acrylic on paper, 810mm x 610mm
Held between presence and passage — three sentinels stationed at the edge of becoming, memory, and withdrawal.
This pastel and chalk composition seeks to haunt the viewer. It presents three elongated, spectral figures — part-icon, part-architectural element — occupying a compressed pictorial space marked by geometric divisions and symbolic shadows. The palette, dominated by muted greys and charcoal blacks, is punctuated by sudden flashes of gold, red, and white, which lend the piece an almost liturgical drama. These figures, with their narrow torsos, stitched-in symbols at the abdomen, and disproportionately heavy heads, evoke a quiet unease — something ancestral, ceremonial, and unfinished.
The golden hoods and mask-like faces hint at shifting identities, or the layering of personas. The figure on the left, smallest and most angular, seems arrested mid-motion — bearing both a face and a drawing of a face on its own square “head-plate,” as if engaged in a recursive act of self-depiction or witnessing. The triangle beneath its feet could suggest a warning sign or sacred ground.
The larger central and right-hand figures stand like icons or sarcophagi, hieratic and still. They occupy vertical niches that recall cathedral alcoves or institutional confinement, suggesting ritual roles, or sentience suspended. The red lips and abdominal knots repeat across the trio, creating an unsettling unity — part stylisation, part cipher. Their gazes are direct, solemn, and knowing, despite their semi-abstract forms.
The work’s background structure is a psychic architecture: doors, ladders, and slabs imply passage, obstruction, & entrapment. This is a theatre of memory, inheritance, or surveillance. The chalky grain of the medium adds to the atmosphere of sedimented time — as though the figures had emerged from within the walls themselves.