Growing up in Cornwall, I've been deeply connected to the sea and the beach most of my life. Coastal landscapes hold significance for me, representative of the very essence of home. I navigate the duality of inhabiting these spaces as a local, feeling the impacts of tourism, and playing the tourist elsewhere when I travel.The desirability of coastal locations as holiday destinations tangled up with the personal significance of a place as home has formed the context for my practice. I'm fascinated by how individuals occupy and interact with these environments and the vulnerability of human expression within this setting. An inquiry into modern leisure and tourism introduces ideas around privilege, glamour, and societal standards that infiltrate into concepts of body image, vanity, and self-consciousness which feed into my work.
The human figure is central to my practice, serving as a vessel for exploring the tactile qualities of paint. I draw from the world around me, pulling my friends and family into the paintings. Each beach scene I depict is an accumulation of my own experiences, as they are based on photographs, I have taken myself, thus harbouring an element of memory and nostalgia. When translating these images onto canvas, I am interested in building a strong surface energy, drawing quickly with paint to capture the essence of a moment rather than striving for precise representation.
