I am a visual artist in Edinburgh, Scotland.
My paintings are from real and imagined places. Often begun in the landscape – an abandoned village in Spain, the mountains of Italy, disused cottages in Dumfriesshire – they return to a place of imagination to consider, memory, displacement, romantic notions of ruin. The act of painting restructures what I see, how I remember. Colour, composition, mark making help me locate visual tensions, contradictions, that fragment and reveal remembered patterns of time and place – a kind of dreaming. Personal memory, found objects, images, stories, contribute. I wish to disrupt nostalgic narratives and at the same time explore the aesthetic choices of memory.
Growing up an identical twin in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, I lived in Vermont, Pennsylvania, California and New York City before coming to Scotland in 1990. I left urban life in Brooklyn for a cottage in Glenisla, Pethshire, then a sheep farm in Angus before settling in a tenement in Edinburgh.
For many people who migrate, ‘identity’, ‘place’, ‘home’ are shifting, transitory. My work draws on my experience of displacement to look at the beauty and danger of nostalgia, consider the unreliability of memory.
I am a member of:
Scottish Artist’s Union
Studio 1.1, London
Scottish Society of Artists
Visual Arts Scotland
Scottish Contemporary Art Network,