Black like me

Between 2019 and 2023, my practice moved into an unusually introspective and experimentally open phase. During this time, I became increasingly drawn to materials that carried their own histories objects found on my walks through rural Hampshire, Kent, and Sussex. Old gates, discarded doors, weathered boards, and fragments of farm life became the surfaces on which I worked, sitting alongside more traditional linen and canvas. Each object arrived already marked by use, labour, and landscape, and painting on them felt like entering into a quiet dialogue with their past lives. My thinking during this period was shaped profoundly by my immersion in Southern Folk Art traditions, particularly from the American South. I was captivated by the way artists in that lineage transformed the everyday barn wood, tin, tools, domestic remnants into powerful visual statements. Their resourcefulness, their refusal to separate art from life, and their instinct to make meaning from whatever materials were at hand resonated deeply with me. What struck me most was how these objects, once purely functional, became carriers of memory, spirit, and imagination once placed in an artist’s hands. That ethos of reappropriation became central to my own practice. By retrieving abandoned materials things once used on farms, in homes, or in the rhythms of rural labour — I found myself giving them a new purpose and a new voice. Painting on these surfaces felt like an act of renewal: the object’s former life remained visible, but the work layered on top allowed it to speak differently, to be seen differently. In that transformation, I felt connected to a long tradition of making art from what is available, what is overlooked, what is left behind.
The Covid years intensified this shift. As the world fell into a strange stillness, the studio became a place of calm, solitude, and uninterrupted exploration. With external noise stripped away, I could listen more closely to materials, to intuition, to the playful, unrigorous joy of painting that Folk Art had reminded me of. Ideas surfaced with a clarity I hadn’t experienced before. The works that emerged from this period carry the imprint of that quiet intensity: they are records of resilience, contemplation, and the instinct to create meaning in a moment when time felt suspended.

MediumOil on found farm panel ( circa: 1880's )Size38cm x 89cmYear2020