About this work:

“When I was 18 years old, I moved to London from the depths of rural Lincolnshire to attend university at Central Saint Martins. Despite having spent the odd day in the city prior to my move and feeling a deep sense of urgency (that probably only 18 year olds can feel) to live in London, the experience of uprooting and the culture shock that followed was probably one of the most impactful chapters of my life. I arrived with an idyllic image planted in my brain of the lifestyle I was destined to experience: hanging out at galleries, moving through circles of impossibly cool creatives, hopping on the tube and knowing innately ‘where to go’. Swapping my backyard views of ploughed brown fields that stretched out to infinity to a sweeping plane of skyscrapers that twinkled with impossible possibilities. That was the vision.

Then we get to the reality. To illustrate my experience of being a first-year in London, I always think back to the core memory of recurrently taking the train from Peterborough station (which my parents had to drive 45 minutes from the village we lived to access) back to Kings Cross, after another weekend of escaping the city to go back to the familiar grounds of home. Watching the landscape twist from vast skies and open plains into the steel thrum of the city limits, feeling myself reduce back into an anonymous dot among it all, already craving the ever-changing colour palette of the sky, and wanting to push away the tall buildings that loomed high and close.

Over the years, I learnt how to love London and eventually came to know 'where to go', how to embrace its proximity and energy, and also how to seek out alternative landscapes that gave me back the gift of starkness and solitude that I had grown up with. Through this experience, I realised how deeply attuned I am to my immediate surroundings, and how this is such a foundational part of who I am as a person and as an artist. I started painting again, and realised with some curiosity that mountains inexplicably appear to signify the go-to symbol of my inner landscape. When I make monoprints and paint intuitively, mountain ranges continuously emerge. They are neither the rural flat lands or the thronging cityscape that shaped me, but they possess the same sense of isolation, magnitude, and anonymity as the two opposing environs that I battled between. I started to wonder whether they represented the space between city and country, urban and rural, spaces either maddeningly empty or claustrophobically close. ‘Broken Wing, Crooked Mountain’ feels like a key representation of this core part of my identity and practice.