Mythmaking

My work starts from one idea: everyone is carrying an enormous interior life (memory, desire, grief, history) while looking, from the outside, like a person on their way to something ordinary. I'm interested in the gap between those two things, and in what happens when art closes it, even for a moment.

I don't believe there's a hidden order behind this life, or another world waiting behind it. But I don't think that makes this one flat. If anything, knowing we're temporary (that places change, memories distort, murals themselves eventually disappear) makes the intensity of being alive feel far stranger than it has any right to. Myth-making is how I reach for that feeling, in a way that manages to be hyper-local and universal at the same time. It means borrowing the scale and permanence that myth carries and lending it to people who would never claim it for themselves. Showing them the extraordinary in their ordinary lives.

Every painting starts with a face or a pair of hands, built up as close to real as I can get them. That specificity is what lets a stranger recognise an actual person inside the myth. Around that figure, light carries most of the meaning. A hand breaking the surface of water, lit from somewhere below, says as much as the face above it. A length of thread pulled taut or glowing against a painted night sky does the same work. Both images come from a specific piece of folklore, existing or invented, and the painting takes its title from that story, so the myth sits underneath as hidden meaning: something a viewer can go looking for, or simply feel without ever being told what it is.

Almost all of this work happens in public space, and that matters to how it's met. Most people don’t decide to visit it. They're on their way to somewhere else, and something interrupts the ordinary register of their day. The artwork is how I get someone to stop. What happens after that is the actual work: a moment of slowness in a life that rarely allows for one, and the quiet recognition that their own story might be just as large.