Favourite 2025

 

My current series, Favourite, explores the tension between intimacy and distance, capturing the way my children present themselves to the world through social media. I paint portraits of them, using images taken from their stories, posts and reels on Instagram after they have moved away. The images they share online—carefully posed, filtered, and constructed—are reimagined in my work, distanced from the rawness of their original moments. The act of translating these curated images into paint gives a sense of space and detachment. This work is a product of confronting the shifts in my role as a mother and artist.  

 

1989

 

 

The ‘1989’ pieces are reflections on the themes of memory, nostalgia, the point between childhood and adulthood, the connections we form with particular places, and the sites where rites of passage into maturity are enacted. These collages reconfigure the sketches and ephemera found in my notebooks from that period (tickets from buses, gigs and the cinema, sweet wrappers, magazine clippings, scraps of paper with phone numbers) alongside maps and new elements.  Paint clouds over and obscures details, foregrounding others. These works are about the moments, the autobiographical details, that the component elements represent, but they are also about the processes whereby those memories are themselves adapted, edited and shaped into a coherent personal history. The integration of juvenilia from teenage sketchbooks within collages created currently also works to produce a reflective commentary on my own artistic development.