The Glasgow School of Art

My practice is an overlaying or process-based combination of the methodologies of poured abstract painting and pop art signs. I examine the relations between the exploratory act of creating paintings, their context and presentation and how that includes an awareness of the role of digital and virtual images. The intention is to discover how, through the act of making, contemporary abstract painting becomes a material activity that co-exists with and reflects digital representation. By encompassing embodied gesture, form, colour, line, chance, depth and opticality, the digital is referenced in painting by the absence of hand-gestured expression with the use of stencils and clip art alongside industrial processes and materials; flatness, layering, household paints, varnishes and more recently spray paints.

The stencils and clip art are sourced from the internet; digital symbols, emoji’s, vanitas skulls, dice, flames, words, decorative flourishes, brush-marks, etc. (with attendant art historical or popular cultural meanings). The paints, supports and working tools are purchased from builder’s merchants. This use of utilitarian ‘non-art’ materials and symbols asks questions about the value of paintings medium specificity or the high art language of material abstract purity (Clement Greenberg) and replaces it with an expanded set of popular cultural and decorative references.