World-building seems to play a central role in your artistic process. Can you share how you approach creating imagined planes and the narratives within them?

“I’m really interested in the ‘in between’ spaces, and deriving meaning from the relationships between two opposing things. I think as a society, we work pretty hard to classify things, in order to make them easier to understand. This makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint, where categorisation for decision making conferred a survival benefit (is that animal friendly, or is it going to eat me?), but as we now lead more complex lives, the binary approach leaves a lot to be desired. My interest lies in the middle-ground, the parts of us defined by where we don’t belong, rather than where we do.

Sergei Eisensteins ‘Collision of Shots’ forms an interesting analogy; in his montage theory, he proposes that two opposing but separate scenes can be superimposed to create a third meaning. A baby in a pram, for example, might evoke thoughts of family, of caring and nurturing.

Footage of a lion might make us think of its power and majestic nature. To place these scenes side by side however, or in quick succession, changes the meaning, and might conjure feelings of fear, danger, urgency, or a need for protection.

In my work I am interested in using contrast (both material through the use of concrete in the work, and visual) to create this theoretical third meaning, and question what it means to be in this imagined ‘borderland’ between the two things. But this means building a world that is in the ether, perhaps a no-man’s land. I look a lot to surrealist painters like Gertrude Abercrombie and Leonora Carrington for ways in which they imbue a sort of haunting presence in the scenes they create.

Looking more historically, I love the dramatisation in Caravaggio’s paintings, and the way the sublime is conjured in many illusionistic Italian ceiling paintings. I think a lot about the way in which language can be translated from the written to the purely visual or the abstract, and many of my ideas for paintings are sparked by a line in a poem or a book.”