My paintings are occupied by a notion of bodily indecision and flux which is apparent in Deleuze’s theory on Becoming. I became interested in the idea of Becoming and all the precarious potentialities it offers after reading Francis Bacon – The Logic of Sensation by Gilles Deleuze.The paintings are not designed to be concrete or stable scenes, instead they should operate as moveable porous organisms, where parameters and boundaries become penetrable. Solid designations of the self and the other become insignificant. The ghostly protagonists and scenes I depict pivot on the threshold between being and dematerialisation.The paintings are derived from photographs of dioramas I arrange as still life compositions out of various materials such as octopus tentacles, crab claws and plants. I use the dioramas as the starting points for my paintings. The process I adopt: painting, erasure and repainting, allows the image to fall in and out of focus and presence. A welcome outcome of this procedure means that the original painted intention can completely morph and re-establish itself under another guise. Through this process of painting, motifs begin to manifest themselves in the compositions which are honed and mutated to become part of the work’s vocabulary, or genetic molecular structure. One of these reoccurring motifs is the picket fence which allows the viewer a route into the intangible scenes depicted. The dioramas have to portray a sense of a rupturing exterior surface, as if held in a tentative state. I therefore use a variety of textures in the dioramas, juxtaposing the hard with the soft and foamy, which when translated to paint will allow the composition to mutate and drift. David Altmejd’s sculptures are of influence. Altmejd juxtaposes the organic with synthetic glass crystalline shafts to illustrate that a transformative process is at work.My compositions originate from reality yet have been transported through a process of making, photographing and then painting. The painted supports act as lawless realms, where systems and restraints in our environment have gone awry. This leaves forms to collide, collapse and re-form. The paintings involve wiping, repainting and re-wiping a number of times in order to obtain a sense of history and passage through staining and residue. This particular painting process of layering and removing allows the subjects to linger in a ravine of bodily indecision. Wiping the surface of the painting opens up compositional space, allowing transition zones to become operative. These seemingly vacant terrains could be deemed as areas waiting domination or equally they could mark a state of constitutional demise. When beginning a composition I work from the centre of the support encouraging paint to flow to the perimeters of a piece. I see the paint as mimicking the constant dividing of a cell in mitosis. Pushing the brush marks to the edge of the support gives a potential for transference of form and painterly genetic information from one piece to the next.I draw influence from Deleuze’s notions on Becoming: the process by which things are engaged in an infinite cycle with no beginning or end. A subject in a state of becoming is an open vessel with a multitude of paths of flight for mutation. In ‘The Logic of Sensation’, Deleuze notes a number of different methods by which becoming is shown in reference to Francis Bacon’s work. The severance of the head from the face and the body from the spatializing material structure (which I envisage as some kind of internal scaffold situated at the core of a form), are some of the theories that have influenced my work- in particular with regard to my rendering of the semi -present subject. I tend to render sections of a composition initially as full bodied entities before wiping away the top layer of paint to reveal a structural framework, allowing potential manifestations to pour through the gaps.The intangible, uprooted nature of Samuel Beckett’s literary scenes are of influence to my work. Beckett’s works are characterised by unhinged descriptions, for example, in the opening of ‘Waiting for Godot’, “A country road. A tree. Evening.”Philip Guston’s work is also of influence to my paintings, firstly for their non -linear narratives, where symbols and motifs are manifested, before then reducing into the surface of the painting membrane, to then be addressed in later compositions. In addition to this, his compositions appear situated in a nameless precipice between abstraction and figuration.The economic utilisation of paint in the work of Luc Tuymans and Raoul De Keyser seems appropriate to my line of thought. Both artists depict bleached reductive compositions which hold a simultaneous potentiality to strengthen or reduce further. I purposefully subdue the colours in my paintings, unifying them in generalised sweeps of a brush, preventing the pigments and the compositions from being understood as achieved concrete states of being. The colours have to have the potential to fade or strengthen.In order to prevent the paintings from being read as closed stabilised entities I administer subtle interception points. These points come in the form of contrasting methods of applying paint to illustrate a rupturing in the surface of the composition. The interventions occasionally include rotating the support to enable a breakage in rationale and therefore allow the emergence of other potentialities for the composition – Maintaining the works perpetual nature.“The body exerts itself in a very precise manner, or waits to escape from itself in a very precise manner. It is not I who attempt to escape from my body, but it is the body that attempts to escape from itself by means of....in short, a spasm: the body as plexus, and its effort or waiting for a spasm.”

Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon, The Logic of Sensation.