Staring at the tiled wall of my tiny urban bathroom, I conjure up a Swiss pre-war spa resort, filled with hushed voices. Then, with a sudden change of light, it becomes the inside of an industrial slaughterhouse. My own bathroom tiles, crusty as they are, seem to harbour both meanings at once, and it seems to me that there's more to it than just my own desires and memories, my "imagination". Instead, I'd like to think that these spaces and their tangled histories are, somehow, right there.

That to me is painting: a surface that allows other histories, other places, other paintings to appear. The alterity of it all, happening all at the same time, right now. This confluence, past as present, is what inspires me to make new work. David Salle: "every rupture is also continuity."

I build and make it collapse, copy-paste, torture the surface, mess around to eke out what it might give me. Man-made environments (you might call them 'architectural') and the traces of meaning left therein are my main source of raw material. I like swimming pools, as have many painters before me, because of their embodiment of hope and leisure, their seductive curvature. But it's just pinterestsy kitsch until the signs shift their meaning all of a sudden, the tables are turned, and something appears that wasn't there before. The tiled pool becomes a deep pit, in which I dig with my brush like Seamus Heaney dug with his pen.

ongoing, February 2021