word collection paintings

Word collection is an experimental series of paintings emerging from an exploration of the intersections between image and word, using language as a kind of primer to generate paintings. 

Beginning with a desire to bathe myself in ignorance, I gravitate towards words that are new, foreign, or whose meanings are obscure to me.  I subvert the notion of words as containers of knowledge and meaning.  Instead I use them as pointers to things we don’t yet know; and as a means of accessing the shadow side of knowing and knowledge: the chaos, misconceptions, and free associations.  

I harvest words from dictionaries, people, Google Street View and from my everyday reading. They are typed, kept in bottles, poured into a sieve, and the first one sifted is used as a starting point for a painting.  This almost alchemic process allows me to explore free-flowing associations between colour, gesture, form, and my instinctive response to the original word stimulus. 

Word collection - both the source words and resulting paintings - has become a living, breathing archive from which I sift, draw and embrace the unknown, with the aim of exploring where and if my perception and understanding meets the world.