Introduction

     I am engaged in the parallel practices of painting and performance art. Both seek to destabilise the viewer’s
     relationship to intimacy.

    Paintings

    At first glance my paintings are delicate and obsessive watercolours of plants. Their attention to detail reveals a
     process of hermetic intensity - every hair is painted and every vein observed as a mark of devotion. Yet their
     powers of seduction are disproportionate to their scale and they quietly undermine the viewer’s expectations to
     identify them as flora since they pervert and hybridise existing plant forms.

    These tantalizing, intense paintings are extravagant and improper in order to question the determinism of biology.
     They unhinge naturalism through their implausible colour, unfamiliar structures or their cross-seasonal fruit and leaf.
     And, when they have subtitles, (for example, wry sentences such as “Your Baseness is a Luxurious Scandal”) these
     graft meanings onto them which suggest stability, thereby presenting a contradiction. These subtitles act as
     allegories that both repel and seduce the viewer in counterpoint to the stillness of the image.

    With or without text they all suggest a striving for connection to the ground; their subjects seem to be searching for
     a place for their roots to become embedded in wet earth. Since one cannot find security in that which is inherently
     volatile and insecure they are endlessly destined to remain uprooted.

    Performances

    Characteristically, my performances have featured myself immersed in fluids, for example, water or milk, and
     focus on the detail of the body, such as my mouth; all directly referencing the erotic and the grotesque. I re-place
     the fluidity of the inside outside and make it exchangeable with other bodies. Sometimes the work is silent,
     sometimes there is text. A mutual witnessing occurs between myself and my audience that explores the limits of
     permissible intimacy and the implications of transgressing boundaries in the moment of performance.

    This exchange with another person – the audience - is ‘the live experience’. It is indefinable in terms of the
     intellect, it is the unknown, a place impossible to articulate or analyse whilst it is happening. The moment of
     symbiosis, the apex of ‘the live’, creates a transformation through physical action where the personal responsibility
     of the audience exists on the same level as the artist. It places both audience and performer in unfamiliar territories
     allowing for a confrontation where dialogue becomes unavoidable.