The work presented here continues in the vein of Surrealism, objective chance, psychic automatism, the dissolution of identity, contested landscape and an obsession with editing unconscious acts within the context of a faceless modernity.  The use of grattage, frottage and decalcomania evoke an unbridled and dissolving fantasy, as well as a clash between rational perspectival space and the oneiric irrationality of bio/mechanomorphic forms floating in space (e.g., the work of Ernst or Matta’s ‘Years of Fear’ 1941-2 provides a historical context for reinterpreting these modernist ideas).

One consistent thread in my work to be interrogated and expanded upon is the function of black as a ground suggesting deep cosmological space and notions of the infinite.  Within this context, form cuts and divides dark depths and the hard graphic lines become scrapings of logical form and volumes.  There is a simultaneous desire to possess form intimately and keep it remote, to deliberate over it obsessively or render it with spontaneity.  Furthermore, black functions to anchor the marks indexically, much as a shadow is bound to a form.  In the case of my paintings, the initial condition is an explosive drop of liquid pigment, and while subsequent marks harness that element of chance, they are continuously re-recorded by mechanically moving liquid wax/pigment over them with a hard metal edge.  In this respect, they become indexical in nature (with index defined as a unique trace or precipitate of an event or chance occurrence) and share more similarities with, for example, photography or wind and a weather vane than with iconic painting.  This becomes another layer of disruption in that the marks become very resistant to decoding given the extensive use of veneering.  

  Balancing this disruption and Baudelairean impulse towards blackout is a drive to locate and make the medium become geology and elemental scenery while insinuating human elements through schematic outlines and graphic flourishes.  Landscape painting as a genre, remains an excellent place to lose oneself and debate nature’s subordination to the map of the built world and modern civilization.  Is there only room for a domesticated, threatened landscape, however wild? Can endeavor and conquest be distinguished?   The work presented here is part of a series of paintings that dramatize and question the modern romance of adventure into the natural and alien unknown.