Highs and Lows, oil on board, 21 x 30cm, 2024

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BEEP 2024 (Biennial of Painting 2024)
I Won’t Stay in a World Without Love

Shortlisted Artist

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In 2024 I was shortlisted, alongside only 40 artists for this international painting award. My work Highs and Lows was shown in the main prize exhibition in Swansea. BEEP has been established as a major event within contemporary painting, with artists showing the breadth of painting practices in the UK and further afield at the present moment.

As part of the event, everyone who was longlisted was also asked to respond to a song title chosen by the selectors. Working at a set scale, these small paintings were shown as a collection at Aberystwyth School of Art from January to March 2025.

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The work which was selected for this major International Art Prize was part of ongoing studio research into iterative painting. My research questions currently are:

In what ways do specific repetitive and process-driven mark-making strategies foreground and challenge the meditative, durational aspects of artistic production?

How does the strategy of employing iterative mark-making techniques allow for exploration of persistence, variation and error within painting, and what does this reveal about the role of process in contemporary abstraction?

Highs and Lows was a painting developed for this exhibition and was specifically focused on visually considering how a close connection develops between me as a painter and a recurring, repeated subject.

By making a painting of a painting, through processes of looking and re-looking at the source materials, in order to develop a new version of it, allows a contemporary painter to understand the subject in a new way as the process of painting-making dictates how the source material is responded to. Rather than being a new work seeking to become a faithful repetition of the original work, the processes allows for a constant ebb and flow of fidelity and abstract mark-making to be brought to the fore.

The work pointed to the importance of the process of an artist 'getting to know' their subject through prolonged, repeated exposure to it. The result of making and re-making this work was that it began to be seen less as a 'whole' and instead fractured into component parts, aligned with the order of the making and layering activities.