My work as a figurative painter is firmly rooted in the broader tradition of representational art. I work predominantly in oil and my recent works are figurative compositions that aim to be unsettling.Through the use of photography and collected media images, I gather fragments of gesture that often happen by chance. These gestures are most exaggerated and often occur at the occasions where we still hold on to tradition. The figures in my paintings are defined by these social situations. As I paint a slow unravelling and disintegration of the event begins to appear.I work with an existing position of detachment; a detachment that can be found when looking at an eighteenth century conversation piece or a twenty-first century social networking site. The genre of the English conversation piece has informed much of my work, because I recognise in the narrative the same aspects of gesture that we see on Facebook and Bebo; they mask an underlying truth.I am attracted to the idea that the English conversation piece, or conversational portraiture, was emblematic of ‘modern behaviour’ (rather like social networking sites are for us now); and the social interaction of the individuals in these pictures offer a narrative of a perfectly balanced social game.The eighteenth century paintings of Arthur Devis and Thomas Gainsborough have both informed my work. However, it is in William Hogarth’s satirical interpretation of the conversation piece where I find the most parallels to my own work. The layers of symbolic meaning and narrative that are crucial to his art manage to suggest the essential vulgarity hidden beneath the polite veneer. He depicts the art of politeness being practised and demonstrated through particular kinds of social ritual.As part of my pictorial analysis a number of clues emerge leading the viewer to a multiple investigation of femininity. A number of ways of being a woman are also unfolding as I compose each painting. There are mother, daughter, granddaughter and wife relationships; and a narrative begins to evolve as I paint. The twenty first century works of Paula Rego, Marlene Dumas and Chantal Joffe have inspired this part of my pictorial analysis.However, it is when I look at the conversation piece of the eighteenth century I am reminded of the gestures that we hold onto in the social gatherings of the twenty-first century. We are now in an age that has lost its gesture because the meaning behind our gestures is no longer relevant but, in certain social situations, where we feel awkward or uncomfortable, we attempt to re-appropriate them.A gesture hinders speech, yet gives the potential of being communicated; the ambiguities that remain create a silence. When I paint I am exploring the double nature of gesture, its silencing and its relevance for truth, because the gestures that are being made by the figures in my paintings are silencing the truth.