Aloft, the sailor through a world of ropes guides tangled meditations

2025

Plaster, gesso, oil paint, sun thickened linseed oil, pine

Wall mounted sculpture (upper part)

2200 x 320mm
total 4500 x 320mm






Wall mounted sculpture (lower part)
2200 x 320mm
total 4500 x 320mm


Boldly vertical structures occur throughout these works, signifying monumental edifices. This would be reinforced by the stark whiteness of their surface, echoing rows of artefacts assembled in lapidariums such as the V&A’s plaster galleries, were it not rebutted by their surface details which represent more unassuming and emasculating forms.

Derek Jarman said that “white shuts out, is opaque, you cannot see through it.” [1994]. It is in the friction between white’s promise of the absolute, the visually pure, and the fractured surface details that give these works their tangible tension – a push and pull between indi viduals, cultures and opposites which is initiated in much of my work.
In 2022, upon receiving a no-fault eviction from a studio in Stockport’s little underbank, I made a crude silicone mould from an oak beam which supported the roof of the 19th century building. Running across the length of multiple buildings, it is purportedly salvaged from a Portu guese galleon which sailed in the 16th century. From flexible moulds I create a semblance of old building materials and features ubiquitous with the British high street, creating visual frag ments which reference the precarity of urban development, echoing sym bolism in ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’ [1560, Pieter Brueghel the Elder], in which a Portuguese galleon sails on past Icarus’s legs flail ing in the ocean. Questions are raised over systems of representation and the sphere of awareness predetermined by one’s place of birth. Blue-green ocean permeates Brueghel’s composition, inducing a malaise over the viewer and the subjects. I associate these hues with oblivious ness and indifference, and borrow painting techniques such as sun thick ened linseed oil to elevate the white surface of the plaster and unify the composition.

In the Rafters
2025

plaster, gesso, oil paint, sun thickened linseed oil, beeswax, pine

1100 x 1200 x 900 mm




A plaster cast is laid out across the horizontal plane of a model of my previous studio’s roof. In doing so, the installation invites an embod ied experience of nostalgic distance. Peering into it from an elevated perspective, viewers look upon the cast as if it was an artefact in a museum, in need of support to be preserved and presented. Whilst functioning as a stable frame, the roof structure has an emotive poignancy, distancing us from an interior space.


Mermaid Birth

2025

plaster cast roof slate, gesso, oil paint, sun thickened linseed oil

400 x 500mm




I apply oil colours and media adopted from Brueghel’s process to plas ter casts through a process of mixing when wet and wiping away, meditat ing upon my affinity to the imaginary lives of the sailors. Each side of this diptych begins as an identical form to the other, but is effected and modified through the act of painting, responding in different ways to surface textures and marks, one which echos a feather both falling and ascending.


Born in Stockport, I emerged from my mother’s womb ‘en-caulk’, which is said to predestine the child to become a sailor, and has recently emerged as a motif in my work through these gestures of doubling and alteration.