New artist statement

Representation IV: Mike's holiday snap, Kos 2012

2013, acrylic on canvas, 60x60cm

My work focuses on moments of liminality in tourist travel and touristic spaces, and the relationship between images, memory and experience in our engagement with such spaces. My practice is centred on the appropriation of photographic images from archival sources including social media websites, amateur photography collections, film stocks and my own 'holiday snaps'. These images are then 'reclaimed' through painting and time-based media, in order to explore received meanings and to generate new ones, through the process of re-contextualisation. My images strive for a voyeuristic detachment, which highlights the gap between expectation and reality in the production of the tourist objects and their representations. These images are triggers for memory and imagination, patched together from the totality of that which the viewer has previously seen.

The images in my work are those of a daydreamer. The child who gazes out of the window into the middle distance, is neither inside of the classroom nor outside but somewhere else; a place which is both mediated by the space, and at the same time, produces it. The relationship between subject and object does not exist in conventional time and space but instead is partly imagined and encompasses 'subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history' (Soja, 1996, 57).

My work also represents the unobtainable; the myth. The capacity of memory to produce illusionary versions of the past. Like half-remembered, half-imagined, long hot summers of childhood, these images are like impenetrable, digitised versions of the endlessly looping home movies in our heads. Their ice-cream warmth never satiates our desire to be in the moment. Meaning in my work is everywhere and nowhere, the images are both potent and facile. They are both liminal openings onto psychic space and impenetrable façades that seduce us with their potential for allegory and pathos.

A list of artists whose work has influenced me:

George Shaw, Paul Winstanley, Brendan Neiland, Rosie Snell, Wolfgang Tillmans, Peter Doig, Gerhard Richter, David Hockney, Edward Hopper, Jeff Wall, Martin Parr, Ed Ruscha, The Boyle Family, David Thorpe, Laura Oldfield-Ford, Patrick Keiller, Tacita Dean, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Neil White, Stephen Willatts