HELLO JAMES, THANK YOU FOR TAKING THE TIME TO SPEAK TO US ABOUT OUR COLLABORATION AND TELL US ABOUT YOUR PRACTICE. TO START, CAN YOU TALK ABOUT THE ORIGINS OF YOUR PRACTICE AND WHAT FIRST DREW YOU TO PAINTING AS A WAY TO EXPLORE THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE HUMAN FIGURE, THE NATURAL WORLD, AND YOUR OWN LIVED EXPERIENCE?

I came to painting through a slightly sideways route. I studied at the Slade MFA) after English Literature at UCL, and then spent a long period working in TV production before the need to paint eventually overrode everything. At a certain point I quit, found a studio, and started again in a serious way. Painting lets me hold many contradictions together at once: desire and disquietude; tenderness and threat; beauty shot through with unease. I’m interested in the visceral presence of the human figure, but also the way bodies seem to coalesce with their surroundings, as if landscape, weather, architecture, memory and flesh are all pressing into each other.

YOU’VE MENTIONED LIVING IN THE CITY AND MORE RECENTLY, IN RURAL ISOLATION. HOW HAS THIS SHIFT FROM URBAN TO RURAL LIFE INFLUENCED THE WAY YOU DEPICT THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE IN YOUR PAINTINGS? HAS IT CHANGED YOUR APPROACH TO THE INTERACTIONS BETWEEN FIGURES, NATURE, AND THE ENVIRONMENT IN YOUR WORK?

Living in London for years and then moving to the edge of Bodmin Moor changed the tempo of everything. In the city there was a constant, mechanical hum, speed, finance, headlines and crowds, and I think that seeped into the work as a kind of pressure system behind intimacy. Since moving to Cornwall, and especially through the pandemic, the isolation became literal: the landscapes are bigger, the silences longer, and human vulnerability sits differently inside that space. What hasn’t changed is my interest in an “infernal, indifferent context” around human feeling; it’s just that the sea and the rural edge can do that as powerfully as the city once did, but in a different register.

I AM INTERESTED IN YOUR DESCRIPTION OF THE NEWSPRINT INTERRUPTING THE PAINTED SURFACE WITH A “KIND OF SOFT VIOLENCE.” COULD YOU ELABORATE ON WHAT YOU MEAN BY THIS, AND HOW THAT TENSION BETWEEN FRAGILITY AND DISRUPTION SHAPES THE EMOTIONAL OR CONCEPTUAL IMPACT OF THE WORK?

When I talk about newsprint interrupting the surface with a “soft violence,” I mean a disruption that isn’t loud but is relentless. The printed text is cold, mechanical and indifferent; it refuses the illusion of a seamless painted world. I often paint onto individual squares of newspaper and assemble them as a kind of underlying skeleton, then paint back into and across that grid. I love the way that interference shatters the surface: the painting floats on an undercurrent of information, financial pages, headlines and the anxious churn of the news cycle, while the figures try to find intimacy or meaning inside it.

IN YOUR PAINTINGS, YOU OFTEN INCORPORATE ANIMALS AND HYBRID FIGURES ALONGSIDE HUMAN FORMS. HOW DO YOU SELECT WHICH CREATURES TO INCLUDE, AND DO THEY CARRY SPECIFIC SIGNIFICANCE IN SHAPING THE COMPOSITION OR THE EMOTIONAL ATMOSPHERE OF A PIECE?

Animals tend to enter when a painting needs a particular temperature, a way to pin down a moment or introduce a different kind of intelligence into the scene. Birds, for example, can act like punctuation: they fix a moment in time or activate the air, as if something has just happened or is about to. Sea creatures and hybrids let me stage touch, proximity and unease without explaining them. An octopus tentacle reaching toward a leg can be tender, erotic or threatening, or all three at once, and that ambiguity is productive for me.

YOU HAVE RECENTLY MADE A PAINTING ON TARPAULIN FOR 4BYSIX’S INITIATIVE TO PROMOTE SUSTAINABILITY IN THE ARTS AS WELL AS POSITIVE SOCIAL CHANGE. WHAT CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT THE PAINTING?

4BYSIX’s model, commissioning artists to make work from waste materials and using sales to support community projects, immediately felt aligned with my interest in traces, surfaces and what materials carry with them. When the lorry tarp arrived, the grey stamped grid was the hook. It chimed with my love of building images out of fragments, like my newspaper-square method, and pushed the sunflowers into a kind of Cubist logic: not a single view, but a field broken into planes, repetitions, overlaps and edits. The subject matter came from memory: drives through France and Italy, motorways crowded with freight lorries, and then suddenly huge fields of sunflowers, bright, almost theatrical, but seen through motion and infrastructure. And the tarp itself is that infrastructure.

AS YOU OFTEN WORK MIXED MEDIA, INCLUDING OIL, ACRYLIC, PRINTED PAPER AND GESSO, DID YOU ENCOUNTER ANY CHALLENGES WHEN RENDERING THIS WORK? HAS THIS COLLABORATION SPARKED ANY NEW THEMES OR TECHNIQUES IN THE FINAL OUTCOME?

Tarpaulin behaves very differently from linen. It has its own sheen and resistance, and you’re constantly negotiating grip, drying and how much the image wants to sit on the surface rather than sink in. But that’s also the pleasure: it keeps the painting honest, because you can’t rely on familiar habits. The biggest shift was letting the tarp’s pre-existing grid become part of the structure rather than something to fight. It felt like the material arrived with a built-in compositional engine.

GIVEN YOUR ATTENTION TO THE TRACES HUMANS LEAVE ON THE WORLD, HOW DO YOU THINK ARTISTS TODAY CAN ENGAGE WITH SUSTAINABILITY, BOTH IN TERMS OF MATERIALS AND THE BROADER IMPACT OF THEIR PRACTICE, WITHOUT COMPROMISING THE EXPRESSIVE OR CONCEPTUAL AMBITIONS OF THEIR WORK? IS THIS SOMETHING YOU ACTIVELY THINK ABOUT AS YOUR PRACTICE EVOLVES?

For me, sustainability becomes meaningful when it’s treated as an expansion of what a painting can hold, not a constraint. Materials aren’t neutral: they come with histories, labour, travel, ownership and waste. Taking that seriously can actually add conceptual voltage, like 4BYSIX’s lorry curtains, which already carry stories of movement, journeys and time. Practically this can involve small decisions, but the deeper shift is mental: making work that acknowledges the world it’s made inside, the systems, urgency and vulnerability, without turning painting into illustration. I’m drawn to that balance.

FINALLY, HOW HAS LIFE BEEN TREATING YOU? LOOKING INTO 2026, DO YOU HAVE ANY UPCOMING PROJECTS YOU ARE LOOKING FORWARD TO STARTING?

Life is busy in a good way, lots of painting and lots of juggling. I recently had a successful solo show in Paris with galeriepcp in collaboration with Gertrude Art. So I’m now right at the start of working on my next solo exhibition which will be towards the end of this year. In fact working with the 4BYSIX lorry tarp has already fed into how I’m thinking about materiality for this new show. In the studio I’m currently painting a commission for a collector in the US that will be the biggest painting I have made so that is daunting and exciting all at the same time. I just recorded an episode for season three of the Brave Projects podcast. It’s hosted by the art critic Victoria Komstock-Kershaw and we had a really fascinating chat so I’m looking forward to that coming out in a few weeks.