About

 My work post-2022 work explores contemporary experiences of virtual life through analogue mediums like painting and drawing. The aim is to subvert how a painting-based art practice situates itself and operates in a post-internet age. The video game industry significantly outpaces the combined revenue of film and music and includes an estimated 2.7 billion users worldwide. Advances in computing power have enabled games to grow exponentially in size while business models let studios continually expand and support games for over 10 years in some cases. The overwhelming presence of the internet in everyday life and our time spent in virtual worlds prompted me as a painter to explore emerging digital aesthetics and environments beyond my physical surroundings.

I’ll initially develop compositions through tools like game development engines where I’ll position the in-game camera as a view finder. The camera allows me to travel outside of the intended play space causing graphics to behave in unexpected ways and the illusion breaks down. From these game captures, I’ll develop the scenes into paintings.

Romanticism, nature and the sublime as well as ecology, globalisation and meta realities are the most prevalent themes in my work. The paintings often depict surreal digital environments that embrace the non-places found in computer games and their graphical glitches.

The premise of my work acknowledges its analogue mediums and the historical significance of painting and it’s established cannon. Throughout my work, I’ll make references to art history often in the underlying composition, imagery, or by direct quotation in a scene.

More recently, I’ve used a looser representational style that opens up more decision making during the painting process as well as opening the audiences reading of the scenes.

Through the tactile and analogue process of painting, my work presents surreal and uncanny scenes from virtual spaces inviting the audience to contemplate our relationship with these environments.