“I use painting as a means of introspection, reflection and discovery. I’m interested in the psychological aspects of painting, and how it relates to the viewers’ body and mind through its scale, symmetry, colour and form. I’m equally as concerned with how the work is made, as what is being represented. I instill the work with many layers of paint over time, allowing for the history of the making to be simultaneously concealed and revealed to the viewer. I’m interested in how this allows for parts of the painting to only exist in the viewers’ mind, and how that process of looking engages the viewer in the psychology of the maker.I like to draw connections between images I see in film and animation to historical and contemporary paintings, which I then reinterpret into my own work. For me, painting is an expression of freedom, so I maintain a fluidity in my practice, not allowing myself to be boxed into one way of making. I’ve always been fascinated with things that are beyond our comprehension. Spirituality, the occult, the deepest depths of the ocean, and the farthest reaches of outer space; The feeling of the sublime. Traditionally, in painting, the sublime has always been represented through landscape, depicting the vast beauty and serenity of nature. I align more with the Burkean idea that feelings of the sublime are stronger when presented through something terrifying.For this series, I’m using landscape, specifically the woods, to symbolize the psychology of navigating a path through life. Forests have been symbolized as both protective and full of danger. Full of life, resources and sanctuary, but also danger, evil and the unknown. One must keep their wits about them, and respect the forest in order to navigate through it safely. I want the woods to act as a psychological space that conveys beauty and sadness, tranquility and danger, prosperity and demise. I want these landscapes to act as interior spaces, reflecting a generationally shared psychological state of simultaneous hope for prosperity, and foreboding doom. “The woods are lovely, dark and deep” is a quote from a Robert Frost poem that describes a moment at dusk where the writer stops on his path through the woods, struck by the beautiful melancholia of the “darkest evening of the year”. It’s here that I want to position the viewer, looking in to the beautiful, terrifying, unknown of the woods, the mind, and their own path that lies ahead.”