Gallery at the Playroom
99 Junction Road, London N19 5QX
8th – 13th September 2026
The framed artworks are based on mid-to-late twentieth century postcards from my own collection. Some of these I’ve had for decades; some were sent to me by old friends. The photos on the postcards have an intriguing mix of qualities: a kind of anonymity and artlessness, and strange, unreal colours. As objects, they wear their age and fragility: the blurriness of the camera focus, the inaccuracy of old printing methods, the surface scratches and softened corners of the card — an almost extinct species next to most images now that exist only on screens. I’m moved by physical photographs — no matter how faded, they keep an optical trace of the absent person or place — and by the attempt to hang on to a present moment that continuously and inevitably becomes the past.
I use a variety of techniques to transfer the structure of each photograph onto the watercolour paper. In some works the postcards are scanned and reproduced as black and white acetate transparencies, then printed using a cyanotype or photo-silkscreen process; in others, they’re traced from transparencies via an overhead projector. The monochrome image is then developed with watercolour, gouache, ink and acrylic.
Photographs capture details so precisely, but also have an arbritrariness — why that particular moment, why that particular framing? In the painting process I like to play with chance: the unpredictable seems as meaningful as the intentional, edges and empty space are as important as the centre. Painterly marks push and pull at a photographic reading of reality. The steel tacks that pin the artworks to the backing board are a poetic hangover from the way the paper is stretched prior to painting. They suggest a finality — experience suspended in time — lost, mourned.
Images coming soon