Biografia
This work addresses themes of historic symbolism and narrative in painting from a contemporary perspective. Influences such as the vanitas still life, medieval heraldy and Baroque styling find focus in a practice which uses devices of repetition and mirroring to create evocative tableaux exploring notions of luxury, mortality and nostalgia.
Traditionally, objects in still life arrangements can be read semantically, as indicators of non-material values. Yet in a postmodern environment, can such didactic codes of signification be trusted? Contemporary society is awash with signs, whose network of meanings is complex and non-static. Through recontextualising aspects of past traditions, these paintings seek to open up spaces and anachronisms between old and new systems of signification.
The unobtainability of the nostalgic, the privilege and allure of the luxurious and modern western cultural attitudes to mortality and the human condition are touched upon, at times obliquely. References to high tradition and low popular culture are juxtaposed in configurations that are at times sober as well as archly comic.
