Portfolio

Recent Works

Three Angels.

A common denominator in a lot of my art is my obsession with bodies and cells, this has been an interest of mine for over a decade at this point. When I was young I used to be a medical cadet (St John’s Ambulance to be exact) where I would learn first aid. I would spend hours reading the little pocket book they gave us as if it were a novel. It is simultaneously fascinating and terrifying when it comes to what goes on in our bodies. I often try to capture some of this almost cosmic horror bodily grotesqueness in my art. This piece, ‘Three Angels’, is an exploration of the cosmic side of that horror. It started off as a small sketch on my sketchbook cover that I liked enough to redraw at a larger scale in one of my bigger sketchbooks. I used oil pastels and then

Pick a long expiry date

‘Pick a long expiry date’ is my attempt ,as an underpaid fed up retail employee, to capture the everyday misfortunes and irritations I experience at work. It was primarily done digitally but the background is made up of various photos I have taken of annoying things whilst at work. I chose to make the background warped and brightly coloured as I feel it is reflective of my mind at 6am (which is when I start work).

Printmaking

I picked up printmaking whilst completing my foundation degree and fell in love with it. I love it for how versatile and reusable it is. It was very easy to pick up as a skill and I find that it fits into the subjects I explore with my work.

Beautifying Bugs

‘Beautifying Bugs’ was the name of my final project for my foundation diploma at Arts University Bournemouth, the goal was to change the public perception of insects. I chose, after hours of deliberation and material experimentation, to pursue printmaking (specifically lino printmaking) as my chosen medium. I believe printmaking is incredibly versatile and the results are often eye grabbing and have a hand crafted feel to them. I really enjoyed creating the block prints at university and it was incredibly satisfying to see the designs i drew out take shape. I chose to print the designs on a t shirt for the final outcome as I felt that displaying them on a t shirt was befitting. In retrospect there are definitely things I would have liked to have done differently, namely I feel like I needed to make my message clearer, however the process was enjoyable enough that I chose to carry on doing it once I had finished my project. Below are some progress photos from when I was working on the project.

oil pastel study, was still undecided about what materials to use

Cell block printing

I decided to combine two of my interests into one with this endeavour, I specifically chose red blood cells as my cell of choice as they are recognisable and also arguably one of the most important cell types in the body. These prints are experimental and deliberately messier than my previous works, this is because I wanted to play around with the inks and other materials in a way I hadn’t really done before. I really like the results and would like to use this specific block print in the future.

Initial block print plus some blue posca ink that i spread across the page

Stamp Cell Shirt Experiment

individual stamps made from lino. Most of them are cells found within the humon body except for two which are starts.

I’m not entirely happy with this experiment, not because of the stamp quality but because I think the outcome could have been a lot better. The wonderful thing about printmaking though is that you can reuse the stamps again and again, meaning I can potentially return to this experiment and add more or do something else with the stamps. I believe my main problem here was the layout on the t-shirt, it is simultaneously too crowded whilst having nothing on. In retrospect I would have printed a larger block piece in the middle of the shirt and then used the stamps to frame the block print.

Digital Paintings:

Digital art is my preferred medium when it comes to creating, I love how you can bend it to do whatever you want. My preferred art applications are Clip Studio Paint and Procreate.

Small Studies + Material experimentation

I enjoy experimenting with whatever I can find laying around my bedroom. For these sketchbook studies I used colouring pencils, oil pastels, scraps of paper from my desk, inking pens of various thicknesses, posca pens, watercolour paints, my ipad and my printer scanner.