Alone in the jungle of the opressor

Alone in the Jungle of the Oppressor forms part of a larger series of paintings, drawings, and mixed‑media works created on original ledger sheets dating from 1840 to 1935. Each sheet carries its own story a fragment of economic, agricultural, or domestic record‑keeping and each bears the marks of a life once lived: handwritten accounts, calligraphic flourishes, ink stains, and the quiet authority of archival paper that has survived more than a century. Nearly one thousand individual works have been made on these pages, each sheet carefully and respectfully removed from its original ledger book, sourced through gifts, antique markets, and specialist dealers across the UK. My interest in these ledgers grew alongside my engagement with Southern Folk Art traditions, particularly the way artists in the American South transformed everyday materials into vessels of expression. In that lineage, discarded wood, tin, tools, and farm remnants were not simply surfaces they were carriers of memory, labour, and lived experience. I was drawn to the radical simplicity of that approach, the belief that art can emerge from what is available, what is overlooked, what once served a practical purpose. Working on these ledger sheets became a form of reappropriation and renewal. These documents, once used to track harvests, debts, livestock, or household accounts, had been abandoned, forgotten, or left to decay. By bringing them into the studio, I offered them a new life — not erasing their history, but layering contemporary imagery onto the traces of the past. The fusion of the original calligraphy, beautifully written by hands long gone, with my own drawings and marks creates a dialogue across time. It binds contemporary art to historical record, allowing the page to function simultaneously as document, artefact, and artwork.

In this series, the past is not a backdrop but an active collaborator. The ledger sheets guide the work as much as I do: their textures, stains, and inscriptions shape the composition, inviting a conversation between what was once functional and what has now become expressive. Through this process, the series explores how meaning can be reclaimed, how forgotten materials can be reanimated, and how art can emerge from the quiet persistence of objects that refuse to disappear.

MediumOil pastel and crayon on Ledger sheet (Dated)Size27cm x 58cmYear2023