My paintings evolve through a process of accumulation, change and reworking. They may take more than a year to complete, as I return to them repeatedly, building up, removing and altering the surface over time. Using brushes, palette knives and scraps of material, paint is built up, removed, obscured and reapplied across different supports, shifting between dense, highly worked passages and thin washes.

Memories, treasured objects and things encountered in everyday life are central to my practice. The work develops from recollections and experiences, both past and present, and the things and places associated with them. These include formative places such as my grandparents’ home, a childhood wood and solitary night walks across open fields during adolescence, as well as more recent experiences of change and loss.

Treasured objects are accumulated over time through a process of selection and attachment. Thirty years ago, I acquired a nineteenth-century edition of Paradise Lost alongside a contemporary study guide, prompted by an early fascination with the text at school. Other materials enter the work through inheritance and chance, including a box of objects left by a dearly missed friend.

Within the studio, elements drawn from these memories, objects and observations are repeatedly reworked through the act of painting. Certain motifs and colours recur as a way of mapping experience: the blue of the Paradise Lost book reappears throughout the work, while red often references a remembered childhood lunch box. The resulting paintings offer clues of sorts, but any cohesive narrative is deliberately undercut.

A secondary strand of my practice is the making of wall-based sculptures. Here, found objects become the support for the work. They are altered, taken apart, reassembled and repeatedly painted. As with the paintings, these works develop through an ongoing process of change and reworking.