A Fugitive and a Wanderer on the Earth

Darkened Heart, a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, 2025, oil on rayon, 18 x 24 cm

The shortlisted John Moores Painting Prize 2025 artist discusses the ideas and meaning behind her eerie paintings depicting tents, and explains how light plays an important role in her practice.

#"I came to understand that my use of landscape in painting was not a pure experiencing and translation of landscape, but an understanding that it exists as a psychological terrain. The tents too became part of this, these metaphorical structures which can carry the weight of philosophy and our attempts to understand what it means to be in the world.

The scale of my work is important too. There is something about miniature or small-scale work that almost opens up an infinite space, that of the imagination, that goes beyond the confines of physical dimensions. Our eyes catch on the detail, like barbs, which snag at the consciousness, or at the back of it, a half-remembered time, or place, or thing. I like this idea of the ‘devil being in the detail’, there is something disquieting about detail, something which prickles and lures, which pulls you across a room to see it.

The apparent realism of my work is undermined by an ungraspable sensation, a shifting in that static moment which comes from their construction. They are made from many different sources, from places glimpsed, from memory, from other paintings, so that they become more like the Surrealists 'exquisite corpse', a chimera of many parts that could not possibly live, could not possibly exist. Passed through many consciousnesses as the Surrealists folded paper and passed it from hand to hand. And from this, the uncanny emerges, but also a palpable sensation of landscape where fabric can swell with wind. And again, a wonder at how air or wind can arise from a painting. But it does. Paint moves and slips and allows us to fill in the spaces between the material and the imagined, breathing life into it."

Rain Tent, 2017, oil on canvas, 15 x 18 cm

"My first painting of a tent was exhibited in John Moores Painting Prize 2018, and began this journey I have been on with these transient structures ever since. It was painted just after my father died and after I had spent some time working at festivals. The two things coincided, being in these constructed and temporary spaces that come and unbecome as suddenly as they appear, and being able to wander these empty sites, before anyone arrived, in darkness and dusk, where what is ‘seeming’ is really fragile and transient. I think about this painting as a reflection on concealment, where death is like a conjuring trick, someone is pulled behind a curtain, out of sight, and suddenly hidden from view, behind this thin fabric between worlds, inside and outside, being and not being. Something no longer reachable, which is what the dead become for the living.

They were only in the other room last week, and a cloth has been drawn around them, so you can no longer see them, but you can sense them just out of sight. Air seems to fill a tent in the way it doesn’t fill a house; it pushes against the fabric, almost in an inhalation and exhalation, a breath between structure and air. The landscape and the tent move together."

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