It is through a personal archive of collected photographs taken from television, film and the Internet, that I approach concepts of past and present, and attempt to journey further into images in the studio using paint, canvas, projection, distortion and repetition.

Here I am showing a series of paintings based on photographs (film stills) taken from one of the earliest examples of cinema. The Lumière Brothers created this short piece of film lasting less than one minute in 1895. It shows a train pulling into a station in France and people entering and alighting from the train. I am interested in what could be called the "present moment-ness" of past events captured on film. Through my painting practice I explore the image further in an attempt to understand and make manifest my fascination with certain kinds of images. These are the images that "prick" me (like Roland Barthe's “Punctums”), they connect me to a more open and mindful way to perceive time.

In my practice I investigate a very specific notion of time. This is a sense of time described by the French philosopher Henri Bergson as “duration”.

It is Bergson’s analysis of the true nature of past and present that interest me. The nature of the present is one of continuous change. It can be seen as “pure becoming”, which is to say that, at every single instant, it is outside of itself as it becomes past.
I seek to constitute an "othering" of the present moment in which we look. To provide a frame through which we can feel ourselves seeing and feel the duration that we exist within and that also connects us to all past times.

I wish to capture in pictures the journey I take when recreating (remembering) these images in paint. It is the very fluidity of paint and the time based activity of painting which allows me to take this journey.

Through distortion of image and perspective I create ambiguous image spaces that seem to lie in-between the past moment of the film-still and the surface of the canvas that we perceive in the here and now. It is within this new abstract image space that we find a specific duration captured – the duration of the making of the painting itself. This is my impossible subject – the event of a duration that contains my experience and activity of making where the fluidity of paint and image, medium and pigment, merge with an idea of the fluidity and distortions of memory and perception.