I am an oil painter whose practice explores memory and the quiet persistence of the past in the present.

 

I am drawn to what Mark Fisher called the ghosts of lost futures - that haunting sense of longing for something that never quite came to be and from an ongoing fascination with how images shape our understanding of personal and collective histories. My work moves between nostalgia, remembering and imagining. Using old photographs and fragments of film, I re-imagine moments that feel familiar yet unreachable. These images speak of a past that never truly existed, a future that never arrived, haunting the present as a faint and familiar echo. Through painting, I try to hold the shimmer of that absence.

 

I use Polaroids (often of my own family), found photos and film from the 1960’s/70’s and 80’s as reference. Subjects range from social scenes and domestic interiors to details of everyday working-class life. Moments suspended between the mundane and the meaningful. The visual language of the 1970’s run through my work. Patterned wallpaper and smoking indoors. A palette of browns, oranges, purples and ochres, softened by wear and memory.

 

The references I use are never ‘fixed’. By choosing to paint the subjects unaltered and embracing overexposure, framing errors, blurriness or fading, I draw attention not only to the subjects themselves but to the old technology being used to capture them. This actively shapes the way in which the viewer recalls and understands the past I’m referencing.

 

Sometimes several references photos or one small detail of a frame of film come together to form a single composition. I’m not necessarily representing a past as it truly was but to evoke its lingering presence or afterimage. It’s not a painting of a memory, it’s the echo of a memory, the trace of a trace.

 

Although I often have personal connections to the subject matter, it is not essential. Who and where these people are is not important. The images are chosen to tell strangely familiar stories and to evoke complex emotions and elusive ideas.  They are cultural memories encouraging a cultural retrospection. This is certainly nostalgic, but I am more interested in describing a feeling of absence and a particular form of longing. Not for the past or something lost but for something that was never fully there. A person, a self, an attachment that hovers just out of reach….

 

I paint in oil as it carries with it a deep historical weight and is a medium long associated with permanence and reflection. I’m deliberately engaging with tradition, to elevate fragile, fading moments into something more enduring that demands attention and consideration. The slowness of oil paint and its capacity for layering and reworking mirrors the process of remembering. It is accumulative and always shifting. But the gravitas of the medium itself resists the fleeting, allowing the image to feel more grounded. Painting with oils is an attempt to hold onto something elusive that we feel is slipping through our fingers.

 

My paintings are a way of making absence visible. Art becomes a space where nostalgia is not resolved but staged and sustained. My work doesn’t try to retrieve the thing – it lets it haunt the surface. Nostalgia without an anchor.