Art beyond trauma

Looking back over my recent work, I can see a shift taking place. Earlier paintings were more concerned with trauma as something overwhelming, something that fractured or fragmented the self. The newer work doesn’t deny that history, but it has become more interested in what survives it. The figures are less about depicting injury and more like mythic beings who carry suffering within them without being defined by it.

I think my visual language is gradually moving away from autobiography in a literal sense towards something more archetypal. While these works are rooted in personal experience, I hope they reach beyond it. Viewers don’t need to know my history to recognise these figures as carrying themes of endurance, mortality, memory and transformation. It is in that space that the work begins to become larger than myself.