The body of work entitled Pain-Things is a method of exploring unrevealed consciousness within the fossilisation of being. The work investigates how actions, thoughts, projections of self and ego are encapsulated in the materiality of life. The work posits our existence as being constantly in a struggle to lift out of the thick substance of illusion, with images and light peering through the viscosity of darkness.

Series I Animal & Human
explores our relationship with animals in captivity and the instruments of subjugation used in their domestication.

Series II Creation – Destruction of Binary Hands
The series Creation – Destruction of Binary Hands is the second in the body of work Pain-Things and investigates the detached relationship the id has with the mechanism of hands, handling, creation and destruction. The work visits situations of encounter divorcing the action from the owner, focusing on a mythic moment in time that exists as a type endlessly repeated.

Series III Impossible Landscapes
The series Impossible Landscapes is the third series in the body of Pain-Things. Impossible landscapes map the journey of thoughts from the macrocosm to the microcosm, through the study of ammonites as vehicles for conscious travel into the subconscious. Each piece is an investigation into the revelation of the myriad paths of reality offered, and the challenge in deciphering the illusory from the tangible.

Series IV Crow Fields
A diptych of poured black resin over green.

Series V Fox Hunt
A triple triptych forming a square grid exploring dismembered fox.

Series VI Rat King
Rat King is a work composed of 100 individual units. The piece is a symbol of our social system in megalopolis systems. The term ‘rat king’ is applied to a circle of rats with tails intertwined pulling out to form a circle. There is certainly a metaphor here for our own interrelated condition and how inevitably we are all inexorably inextricable no matter what direction we may be pulling.  The reason rat kings form in nature remain uncertain bordering on myth, as they have only been found as carcasses. The existence of naturally created rat kings is uncertain. According to Hart (1982), there are three possible explanation: (1) rat kings are artificially manufactured, (2) the knot is created due to chance movements of the tails, and (3) the knot is created after the tails are glued or frozen together.

The rat I have chosen to represent was rescued under the arches of London Bridge and named Bandit. This rat was then housed in the London Dungeon display of the plague, in which rats scurried over skeletons. From hundred of photographs of Bandit I chose 100 active movements that most represented her struggle for survival and inquisitive nature. These 100 paintings are then unified in a grand spiral spill effect, both drowning bandit, and linking her with her doppelgangers. A reflection of life in the city I propose an exhibition of Rat King, in order to release the rats from their tension and thus sneak into the confines of peoples homes, where separated from the herd they may exist as individuals but always lacking the part of the whole from which they came.