Charred pigment, ritual gesture, and the shifting ground between being and becoming.
These works inhabit spaces of transition. Over five years, I've gathered bones, bark, and seaweed from landscapes across Ireland and Tasmania, materials shaped by time, tide, and decay. Through fire, these organic remnants are transformed into black pigment: calcium and carbon reborn as charcoal.
Each painting becomes a site of metamorphosis, an ongoing dialogue between artist, landscape, and the elemental force of fire. The materials themselves move through cycles: fire, pigment, and process merging in continuous exchange between creation and destruction. Each work reflects the potential of threshold spaces, the liminal zones between elements, selves, and states of matter, where new forms emerge and dissolve.
In painting, I hold a balance between control and surrender. As ink settles and evaporates, charred particles drift into place like dust in the air or sand depositing in a river. The paintings feature dark, velvety fields of pigment marked by delicate incisions and luminous threads of colour that cut through the surface like traces of movement and energy. Precise incisions slice through, deliberate interruptions that fracture and reconfigure the field, suggesting that even our most defined borders remain porous. Deep pools of pigment encounter sharp gestures, while soft bursts of synthetic colour punctuate the monochrome organic palette, glinting at the edges of change.
Every mark arises from collaborative encounters with place, documenting the rhythm of bodily movement through terrain and a sensory experience of the site. In the studio, these encounters continue as active conversation with material, process, and form, as new images emerge from the spaces between.
Unexpected forms and relationships emerge in the interplay of process, colour, and negative space, a meeting point between earth and light, between process and intention. Each composition echoes the slow metamorphosis of land itself: erosion, death, regrowth, and the endless cycles that bind them.
The paintings are record and ritual, a meditation on the process of transformation, where matter, meaning, and self dissolve and begin again.
Exhibition Opening Night
Fri 7th Nov
6pm – 9pm
Exhibition Dates
7th – 21st Nov
Gallery Opening Hours:
Mon – Fri: 9am – 8pm
Sat: 9am – 1pm
Sun: 10am – 1pm & 6pm – 8pm
