Residual Ground: finding meaning in becoming adrift
At the heart of Residual Ground is a personal exploration of that quiet, most persistent anxiety: the distance between what we once imagined might be possible and what remains as time, memory and circumstance reshape our intentions.
Rather than depicting a traditional landscape, I use the canvas as a composite of our lived experience — a process of looking back, uncovering and reworking what has gone before.
These abstract mixed-media paintings have grown from an interest in moments of drift, unfulfilled ambition and the ways our inner sense of direction changes over time.
The architecture of erasure
Central to Residual Ground is a personal process of building up and tearing down. I often begin with something clear and recognisable: a solitary tree, a vertical stroke, a suggestion of a horizon. These points of orientation give the painting a sense of structure, but I then begin to disrupt them — scraping back, painting over, or allowing elements to dissolve into washes of colour and texture.
What interests me is not simply the act of erasing, but what survives it. Beneath the quieter surfaces are traces of earlier decisions: brighter colours, stronger forms, fragments of marks that have been partly concealed but never completely lost. They become a form of underlying memory, continuing to influence the painting even when they can no longer be clearly seen.
I think this reflects something familiar in human experience. We make plans with a firm sense of direction and possibility, only to find our paths randomly reshaped. When the landmarks we have relied upon begin to shift, we can lose our sense of where we are. Residual Ground comes from that point of uncertainty — from what is left when the original sense of direction has begun to disappear.
Painting as excavation
The physical process of making the paintings is closely bound to this idea. I build up layers of acrylic, introduce texture and then scrape back into the surface, sometimes quite aggressively. Each stage leaves something behind. A colour becomes partially buried; a mark is broken apart; an earlier surface reappears unexpectedly.
The paintings therefore become records of their own making. I am drawn to the moments when something from an earlier state begins to emerge through the surface — not as a reconstruction of what was there before, but as a fragment of its memory.
For me, this is where the idea of residue becomes important. What is lost does not necessarily disappear completely. It can remain in the layers beneath, altering what comes afterwards. The past becomes part of the surface on which the present is built.
The shift in perception over time
Asa devotee of the work of Simon & Garfunkel, I was drawn to the parallels in the song America, a journey through a physical landscape which becomes something more uncertain: a search for identity, meaning and a sense of place.
As with Residual Ground, the search is not necessarily about reaching a destination, but about continuing to look, even when the destination is unclear.
In developing the series, my attention has shifted from trying to control how a painting should resolve towards being more receptive to what emerges through the process. I am less interested in restoring an earlier image than in seeing what can come from its disappearance.
These paintings do not seek a neat conclusion or an idealised horizon. They are about remaining open to uncertainty — to the possibility that meaning can be found not by recovering what has been lost, but by paying attention to what remains.