Institution
Belfast School of Art, Ulster University
Medium
Painting
Graduation Year
Class of 2026
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I am a Belfast-based painter, returning to full-time practice after more than twenty years as an art teacher. My work explores the layered nature of memory, time, and lived experience and I examine how these, alongside the rhythms of everyday life, shape our understanding of place, self and relationships. Specialising in oil paint on large-scale canvases, my work depicts figurers set in ambiguous, domestic interiors. These spaces act as sites of transition, where the accumulation of ordinary moments, memory and anticipation reveal the intimacy and complexity of human connection. The figures are drawn from personal experience, and painting my sons has been a way to explore the transitional space they occupy. It has also been a way to counteract broader cultural stereotypes of teenage masculinity, presenting instead moments of vulnerability and quiet sensitivity. Compositions evolve through the application of thin, translucent layers of oil paint, traces of earlier marks remain visible, and erasure is as important as addition, referencing both the remembered and the forgotten; this process echoes the selective and unstable qualities of memory and perception. Boundaries between interior and exterior dissolve, forming otherworldly, psychological environments. Balancing intimacy with ambiguity, the work resists fixed narratives, through subtle disruptions of space, colour, and form, I hope to create paintings that hover between the familiar and the uncertain. By emphasizing the sensory, subjective and embodied aspects of being in this world, I seek to capture the shifting, layered nature of perception, where memories surface, dissolve, and intertwine with past imagery, present reality and imagined futures, encouraging personal reflection where viewers engage in their own memories, sensations, and emotional responses.
