Biography

Uncovering and accepting fundamental truths of life is the focus of my work. I aim to always portray my work with brutal honesty and to challenge themes within art history. My recent focus has been on the Life and Death, and specifically the human inability to accept death. 

The realities of death have often been difficult for humans to process and throughout art history we see people from all different areas of the world and different cultures, telling stories of an afterlife or reincarnation, to try to provide an explanation for death. We find it difficult to conceptualise that this life is all we have. This human trait is something that fascinates me, and what I have explored through my artwork.

My aim is to challenge the viewers perception of death, by confronting an uncomfortable possibility that there is no otherworldly experience taking over the body when we die, and the visions experienced may just be the brains way of coming to terms with the body shutting down and this may not be linked to religious or spiritual happenings. 

Mainly I work with Oil on Paper and use contrasting tones of light and dark, alongside bright neon colours to create my perception of death. My paintings demonstrate the movement from life into death. My final series of 6 paintings shows the progressing from the colours of life, into the saturated neon visions of the dying experience and then finally into blackness. This take provides the viewer with the uncomfortable possibility that death may be the end, and this ultimately links back to my aim of exploring the human inability to accept death, and challenges this. 

Title of Damien Hirst’s piece, ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’ is something that has underpinned my research and work. Death is such an unknown territory for humans but is something that everyone will face at some point. Often art either romanticises death or shows it in an overly brutal way. My pieces aim to provide the viewer with a more honest depiction of the dying experience, with the message that death may in fact be the end, but this is not something we should fear. ‘Death is one of those things. To live in a society where you're trying not to look at it is stupid because looking at death throws us back into life with more vigour and energy’, Damien Hirst.