It’s a curious thing to describe an art practice within the exclusive parameters of language. For me, the point of painting is somewhere beyond words, to be felt in the form, a physical experience. As humans, touch is the first sense we learn to communicate through and painting enables an immediate physicality, a skin-to-skin intimacy and a spiritual pulse that goes beyond the confines of language and has the capacity to convey a felt sense without cultural exclusivity.

British, born in Japan, having lived in Italy and initially studied Archaeology and Anthropology, the learnt and primal responses of human experience have been a point of perennial intrigue to me. It has increasingly become my deep held belief that we have innately human qualities that defy cross cultural variability and those that are chiselled by cultural expectation. Through abstract painting, I seek to unpick the cultural algorithm and explore a sense of eros (by Freud’s definition), a life force that connects us with a wider sense of humanness and (our place in) nature. In this vein, painting becomes an exploration of energetics over linguistics.

Layered intuitively over time, my paintings present an archaeology of moment; a tapestry of changing states and weather. A painting has the capacity to capture and convey the feeling of air as someone passes or a punch in the gut. In its preservation of touch, painting imbues an honesty that language can mask and with this comes a sense of empowered vulnerability. It is a confronting experience that uncovers preconceptions, aching, pain, catharsis, joy. The full catastrophe.

Nature makes its way into all my work. Through a combination of somatic inquiry and referencing small offerings from the landscape, the paintings develop as a combination of mark making and lightly figurative moments of foliage or water, pendulating between internal and external landscapes. These marks come from memory, a feeling or directly from a branch I collected on my walk to the studio. These references are never intended to be perfectly rendered but to bring in the feeling of our connection with nature and this indivisible relationship. A paramount oneness.

There is another element that inherently comes into the paintings and that is my body, a female body to be precise. Painting through intuitive mark making is unavoidably diaristic. Since experiencing endometriosis and now in matrescence, I’ve felt increasingly connected to my body’s seasonality in its distinctly female format. As a metabolic process, painting becomes a documentation of these seasonal changes intrinsically filtered through a female lens. Even writing this now, the word ‘matrescence’ is cushioned by a red wave, a quiet demonstration of the algorithmic structures peppered with patriarchy that we function within. This life affirming, life inducing process is not accounted for according to Microsoft Word despite being coined by Dana Raphael in the 1970s… curious. But let’s have fun with it. Here, in this realm, my paintings become a kind of life drawing that defies the male gaze historically associated with the discipline. This is not about how the female form appears as an object but how it feels and experiences life energetically.