Artist Statement

What happens to us when we change?

Exploring the stories hidden within humanity

Looking back across more than twenty years of my work, I have begun to recognise a question that has been sitting quietly beneath almost everything I create:

What happens to us when we change?

Sometimes change is chosen. Sometimes it is forced upon us. Sometimes it happens so gradually that we barely notice it until the person, relationship or world we began with has become something else entirely.

My subjects have ranged from sin and virtue to mental health, relationships, mythology, religion, history, identity and Welsh heritage. On the surface they can appear to belong to completely different worlds.

But they don't.

Again and again, I find myself drawn to transformation — to the moment when one thing begins to become another, and to what that transformation reveals about us.

When does pride become arrogance?

When does patience become submission?

When does love become indifference?

When does desire become obsession?

What happens when illness changes the mind we thought we knew?

And what happens to the stories, beliefs and identities we inherit as they pass from one generation to another?

Perhaps I have been asking the same question all along.

​

Art as storytelling

I don't create art simply to make an image or an object.

I create stories.

Research is at the heart of that process. Before I begin making, I immerse myself in the history, symbolism, psychology, mythology or human experience surrounding an idea. I want to understand what lies beneath the obvious before I decide how to give it physical form.

Then the materials become part of the language.

Colour, texture, scale, objects and symbols are rarely there simply because they look beautiful. They are chosen because they say something.

Sometimes that meaning is immediately visible. Sometimes I bury it deeply enough that a viewer has to search for it.

Every detail has meaning.

A painting can contain an entire argument. A sculpture can hold memories, contradictions, emotions and histories within a single form.

I want the viewer to look once — and then realise they need to look again.

​

Making the invisible visible

Much of my work deals with things that cannot easily be seen.

Thoughts. Desire. Resentment. Fear. Identity. Mental illness. Memory. Power. Belief. The private battles that take place inside people while the outside world sees something entirely different.

Art gives me a way of making those things physical.

This became particularly important in The Disorderly Demise of the Cerebral Cortex, where I explored mental health through sculptural heads that contrast the person presented to the outside world with the turmoil that may exist within.

But the same instinct appears elsewhere in my work.

The Seven Deadly Sins and their corresponding Virtues examine the impulses and contradictions we carry within ourselves. The Seven Year Itch follows the transformation of a relationship. My work surrounding mythology, religion and Welsh history explores the way stories themselves change, survive and continue to shape us.

Different subjects.

The same fascination with what lies beneath the surface.

​

The contradictions of being human

I am particularly interested in the places where easy answers disappear.

I don't believe humanity divides neatly into good people and bad people, strength and weakness, virtue and sin, darkness and light.

We are far more contradictory than that.

A virtue can be manipulated.

A sin can begin with an entirely understandable human impulse.

Love can coexist with resentment. Beauty can emerge from something disturbing. Humour can sit beside pain. Strength can become cruelty, and patience can become a prison.

Those uncomfortable spaces interest me.

I would rather ask a difficult question through my work than provide the viewer with a comfortable answer.

That is why darkness and beauty so often exist together in what I create. They are not opposites. They are both part of being human.

​

Stories, heritage and change

As a Welsh artist, I am also deeply connected to the stories and landscape that shaped me.

Wales has given me mythology, history, industry, folklore, humour, tragedy and an extraordinary tradition of storytelling.

Works such as Emrys — The Great Welsh Dragon allowed me to bring those things together, combining the ancient and contemporary to tell the story not simply of a mythical creature, but of a country and its people.

For me, heritage is not something frozen in the past.

It changes as we do.

Stories are retold. Meanings shift. Generations reinterpret what came before them.

Yet something survives.

That process fascinates me too.

​

The artist, the storyteller and the artwork

For much of my life, art has been the place where I could say things I found far more difficult to say aloud.

Perhaps that is why storytelling became such an important part of my work.

The older I become, however, the less interested I am in standing safely outside the stories I create.

There is something of me in them.

My experiences, observations, anger, humour, contradictions, questions and vulnerabilities inevitably find their way into the work.

The boundary between the artist, the storyteller and the artwork has gradually become harder to separate.

I am learning not to hide that.

Because understanding where an artwork came from can change the way we see it.

​

Look again

I don't want someone to look at one of my paintings or sculptures and simply think, that's beautiful, that's strange or even that's disturbing.

I want the second look.

I want the moment when somebody notices the detail they missed.

The symbol that changes the meaning.

The uncomfortable question hidden beneath the humour.

The beauty sitting beside something grotesque.

Or perhaps something within the work that unexpectedly reminds them of themselves.

That connection is where the artwork becomes more than an object.

So perhaps my purpose as an artist is quite simple.

I take the things we carry inside us — our stories, contradictions, fears, beliefs, histories and transformations — and give them somewhere to exist outside ourselves.

Every artwork carries a story.

I want you to look closely enough to find it.