Artist Statement

My mixed media works mirror personal experiences and memories relating to specific moments whilst living and working in a variety of very different contexts. These include the Thar desert Rajasthan, Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka in India; Lake Orta, Turin and Venice, Italy; as well as my return to the UK to establish a new life in Surrey and now, Hastings. My practice is based upon the idea that memory is essential to a sense of being; ultimately, memory is inextricably linked to the equally complex question of identity, personal identity and social or cultural identity.

‘You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realise that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memories is no life at a all.’
—Luis Buñuel Surrealist Filmmaker

Episodic Memory, which comprises unique experiences that happened in a particular time and a particular place makes us unique, and is therefore the focus of my research and practice.

Life, the ordinary, provides the material; I continue to be concerned with memories and remembering, particularly the process of remembering & the indelible memories, which profoundly affect our future. Memory is not just affiliated to the past, it may be very much part of our present & determine our future.

Ideas for my mixed media paintings are recorded daily in sketchbook journals. These visual diaries provide the starting point for larger scale, more resolved works. The format and surface I select to work on is carefully considered; it becomes a sensitive membrane onto which my ideas are projected. Earlier layers of imagery may not be discerned, mnemonic palimpsests, embellished marks, altered, erased, and retraced. Symbols are plotted and mapped, becoming co-ordinated in time and space, making connections between past and present, locating the self, navigating through experiences, and creating references, which become a strategy for survival.