And suddenly, an iceberg
30 October - 29 November 2025
Exhibition Statement
“All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.” wrote Isak Dinesen.
What story can I tell? Only my own.
Earlier this year, I found myself adrift — not lost, exactly, but untethered from a kind of centre that once felt strong within my practice. I felt a deep desire to turn inwards. That desire became the current running through this body of work — a process of mark making, writing, excavating and unearthing, and most importantly allowing the work to reveal itself. It is both story and evidence — a diaristic trace of what it means to feel deeply, to be uncertain, to live in the wake of longing or sorrow.
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“It was the fourteenth day of April… Ruination Day, and the sky was red.” sings Gillian Welch.
Through this unearthing one date kept resurfacing: April 14th — a date charged with both historical, cultural and personal resonance. The sinking of the Titanic. The assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The Great Dust Bowl. It is also the day my sister Scarlet was born, and the day we gathered to celebrate her life after she died, shortly before her 21st birthday in 2012. It’s a date that continues to appear frequently in my life, perhaps in a sort of Baader-Meinhof way (also known as the frequency illusion) where you see something once and then it follows you everywhere. This date became a focal point, a lens through which grief, memory, and meaning converged. Blending fragments of family histories with broader mythology, private symbols with collective ones, this work is an attempt to locate the self within something beyond my own orbit.
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‘While I live, I remember’ said Agnes Varda.
I am interested in the slipperiness of time, truth and memory, for they are unreliable and unfixed. Water has long been a recurring allegory for memory, for grief and perhaps for the nature of an artistic practice itself. Submergence, undercurrents, ripples, flow state, flooding, drifting. Water also holds memory—fluid, shifting, and elusive—echoing the way we carry our pasts within us. Grief has slowly shaped me, in the same way water shapes a rock over time. I keep returning to the image of the ship and the moment of collision. The iceberg became a metaphor — for trauma, for loss, for sudden, cataclysmic change. Scarlet’s death was the iceberg, my life the ship.
As I’ve processed this loss over the past 13 years, I’ve returned again and again to language and poetry— as catharsis, as expression, as release. When the image is a burden, can words be the balm? The titles of my paintings have always been clues or hints; referencing lyrics, poems, and phrases that have influenced my way of thinking and seeing. The small text works within this show form an open ended poem. How they are read can change as much as the words themselves.
Contrary to the smaller works, I have also found working intuitively at a larger scale — the scale of my own wingspan so to speak - has allowed my emotional landscape to take up space, to give power and magnitude to how I have felt in the moment. I think of Icarus and the act of building wings in order to fly. The idea of reinvention, creation and discovery in order to reach new heights feels akin to how I approach my practice. A perpetual extending of the self, tangled up with ambition and failure.We do not know why certain things call to us at certain times, all I do is try to listen. I gather up ideas like wildflowers. The horse, the ship, the wing: these recurring images are vessels of transformation. They speak to the desire to unbecome, to undo. To journey. To risk. To unearth. To take a leap. To look into the red sky. These paintings are born from the impulse to both dig up the past and take flight into the glaring sun of the future.
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‘…all connections were equally meaningful, and equally senseless.’ writes Joan Didion.
What to make of life’s coincidence, chance, serendipity?
When I think of Icarus, I think of falling, and when I think of falling I think of Scarlet, I think of Auden and poetry, I think of love. I think of bandwagons, rain, getting back on the horse. When I think of water I think of time, the iceberg, the wreck, the moon, the never-ending tides. Making this work has been a way of connecting these dots; of attempting to make sense of the senseless. It is an endeavour in mapping memory, at reconnecting with the personal, at trusting that all connections are meaningful.
I’ve stripped these paintings back to their bones. Or perhaps these paintings have stripped me to my bones.
Two things can be true at once.
An anchor and a letting go.