I grew up in Northern Ireland during the troubles in an insulated and somewhat fundamentalist religious community.

I loved to draw and play football. I didn’t love the hellfire preaching and rapture stories from my Sunday school teachers.

I achieved an A grade in GCSE Art & Design and then bottled the remainder of my education until my late twenties, when I studied part-time with the Open University and gained a BA (Honours) in Humanities with a focus on Art history and Art in the modern world.

As a visual artist, I create bold, expressive abstractions that explore the relationships between colour, form and space. Through gestural brushwork and vivid colours, I balance structured elements with spontaneous expression.

My graphic design studio has enabled me to blend traditional design practices with artistic ideas and concepts - I’ve worked with industry leaders in coffee, drinks and hospitality. A recent example of this can be seen in the best-selling book The Business of Specialty Coffee by Maxwell Dashwood which features my abstract work on the cover as well as typesetting and all internal graphics.

My recent Afterimage series engages parts discovered in therapy.

Each painting has two visible sections:

1. Compile all the emotions, hurts, victories, struggles, pains, ups and downs of life and scrape back the layers, then go again, the next day and the next day. Stimulus and its effects.

2. Hold fast. Be curious, show compassion, playfulness, embrace the afterimage. Have hope.

These paintings represent an ongoing exchange between the 1 and 2.

The intersection between my parts and my self represented in the paintings and, the viewers engagement with the work, is a journey yet to be completed or resolved.