For those who don’t know my work, here’s a brief introduction. I paint human figures—often solitary and in desolate environments—yet I frequently push this bleak but ordinary world towards something unfamiliar and uncanny. My figures morph into other beings or they inhabit spaces where other realities intrude and in which both the figures and the environment are changed. Transformation is therefore a big part of my painting and that’s why I chose this title, ‘Of Bodies New and Strange’, a quote from Ovid’s poem, Metamorphoses.

These adventures into the unfamiliar will emerge as I go on but I’d just like to start with some of my solitary figures in barren environments which were exhibited here in Margate, in a show about TS Eliot’s The Waste Land. Eliot came to Margate, to Cliftonville, in October 1922 to recover from a mental health crisis, and although he wasn’t supposed to work during his convalescence, he wrote part of The Waste Land in the beach shelter just over there. Hence his lines ‘On Margate sands I can connect nothing with nothing.’ 

In 2018 Turner Contemporary curated the exhibition ‘Journeys with The Waste Land’ and I was in a parallel Eliot show called ‘At the Violet Hour’ in the Nayland Rock Hotel, next to the shelter. All of us hotel artists were given a bedroom in which to install our art but since the building was in very bad shape this was a bit of a nightmare. Many of its rooms were full of pigeon droppings from birds who had squeezed in through broken windows, some had died in there, and the en suite bathroom next to my room on the top floor was coated in stinking, rancid mess. However, after a considerable amount of hoovering and wiping and scraping the show looked strong and its shabby venue was suitable for Eliot’s poem and its many sordid episodes. So renewed congratulations to its valiant artist-curators Chiara Williams and Shaun Stamp.

The Waste Land has been my favourite poem for years. I love its global disorder and its alienated characters wandering in wilderness. But literature has always been a key influence on my painting. I read English at London university after three years at Saint Martins when a mixture of strict conceptualism on the one hand and rampant sexist hedonism on the other nearly put me off painting for good. Luckily for me, and thanks to the persuasions of my husband Peter, I returned to art much later and the texts that I studied at university found their way into it. I was especially inspired by literary outsiders, a bit like the characters in The Waste Land. So, the outcast Caliban from Shakespeare’s Tempest, the anti-heroes of French existentialist novels, the wandering Sir Gawain from the anonymous poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the reclusive 17th c garden poet Andrew Marvell. And such loners from fiction have influenced my non-literary travellers and nomads: Polar Explorers, Cowboys and Outlaws, Riders, Astronauts, Sami, Berbers and also people in impersonal urban spaces. Here the journey is not across tundra or deserts but along the aisles of Aldi or Asda, down an escalator in Westfield Shopping Mall, and recently on the London tube. I may be a long way from the Arctic but I still paint people who are up against it or adrift: pensioner shoppers, a passenger on the District Line, a solitary millennial, a cleaner in St Paul’s, an abandoned Hen-nighter, a road-sweeper at 6am in Mile End clearing up the coffee that I have spilt across the drawing.

As in this last image intense light plays a crucial role in much of my work. When I first returned to art I didn’t know what to paint, I felt blank. I had gone back to art school, to the Byam Shaw, and plodded along in the life room, bored by all the measuring influenced by the nudes of Euan Uglow. But then I found a subject, I became captivated by neon at night: by the colourful dazzle of petrol stations and motorways. I wanted to paint the violence of opposition between darkness and light in subject matter where a degree of danger is already implicit, and I later brought this dramatic contrast into paintings of human figures. I extended the clash between darkness and neon in my unpeopled, motorway scenes to paintings of figures caught between these two extremes. Between two rather challenging extremes perhaps. Darkness is maybe a source of threat surrounding the Clown or in the streets where the Hens hang out, but light is also rather disagreeable in the sickly glitz of this Casino or the strip lighting of superstores and hospital wards where a figure is gripped in a relentless beam with a suggestion of surveillance. The light is almost like an antagonist—exposing and monitoring those who are trapped in the glare of public space.

And, perhaps rather surprisingly, this sense of malaise in neon is carried over into my paintings in sunlight with figures now depicted as silhouettes with shadows. Sunny days are for getting out and socialising, in paintings by Watteau with his garden parties or Monet and Renoir with their animated open-air lunches. Fun in the sun. So something unusual seems to be going on in these sunlit pictures by Hopper or de Chirico with solitary figures frozen in inaction, or in my own isolated figures in sunlight, like this from The Waste Land sequence or this figure in a wood or this self-portrait in March with its long de Chirico shadow. ‘The worst of flawless weather is our falling short’ wrote the poet Philip Larkin and these pictures show someone away from the group, the picnic, the party, unable to live up to opportunities delivered by lovely weather, maybe paralysed by too many opportunities. 

Then also falling short are some of my Andrew Marvell figures from his poetry set in summer gardens. These poems reference the Fall in the Garden of Eden, and Marvell wandering round the grounds of country houses, compares fallen humans with innocent nature. This is maybe a little unorthodox since the Book of Genesis says that nature was corrupted along with humanity, but Marvell’s nature is blissfully uncomplicated compared with the uneasy consciousness of humans who are plagued by desire or guilt and preoccupied by death in the middle of bright summer. This last aspect recalls Baudelaire’s remark that ‘the idea of death affects us more deeply under the imperious reign of summer, there is then a terrible antithesis between the tropical profusion of external life and the black sterility of the tomb’, an observation which I think influenced my own interpretation of Marvell as a dark, brooding shape—like a blot on the landscape—in contrast with nature shining all around him.

My use of light is not always so downcast, however, it has other effects, other meanings and instead of depicting commercial glare or summertime blues, it can stand for spiritual vision. For example these watercolours made in the sharp light of Morocco are of figures against minimal backgrounds or white paper. I did them sitting on pavements in Fez and Marrakech as shadows shortened and lengthened and the call to prayer boomed out. The shadows inscribe people in space and time, in our own limited reality, while the whiteness of paper suggested to me the starkness of the light but also an idea of the unbound with the Islamic figures like pilgrims against the infinite or against the blank of an unknown God, a bit like my linocut of a priest in St Paul’s staring out at empty space. In both Islam and Christianity, as well as in other religions, a tradition of negative or apophatic theology stresses what we cannot know of the divine.

Then, back to Eliot and The Waste Land, this bleached-out, lemony acrylic is from his line, ‘looking into the heart of light, the silence’ which suggests a moment of blissful, speechless radiance. And a similar intention is behind my triptych made for Hospital Rooms and the new Springfield Psychiatric Hospital in 2022. Called ‘My cottage becomes a universe’ it is from a Chinese wilderness poem and shows hermits in huts and a deer in the forest. My interest in a house in the woods started when I read Grimms’ Fairy Tales with witches in cottages and red light coming from their windows. I did a series based on these in 2018 but for subsequent ‘hut’ paintings and for the hospital murals I removed the witch and thought about these rustic shelters as sites of creativity. My huts are houses of inspiration for a lone artist or contemplative and I turned the witch’s lurid firelight into bands and circles of white light, signifying the creative imagination. The top mural of the deer which reveals itself gradually as you climb the stairs is like a vision in a beam and I deliberately made a slight mismatch between what is inside these beams and what is outside because I wanted the light to be not quite of this world. Another reality is intruding and I wanted to evoke a sense of the unearthly, as in many of my other paintings which have an eerie kind of illumination: Sir Gawain on his journey to the supernatural Green Knight; Actaeon about to be turned into a stag by goddess Diana; Riddled with Light in which the figure on the right is transfigured; Silver Feet, another apparition of a deer, this time in a moonbeam; Pink Beach with its burst of light, painted for a cathedral show on the theme of Resurrection. And most obviously, my earlier series of Beach paintings, begun in 2003, bring sunlight and darkness into unreal juxtaposition. Here day and night appear simultaneously as in Magritte’s surreal paintings of night streets beneath daylight or Lewis Carroll’s poem ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ in which

‘The sun was shining on the sea

Shining with all his might….

And this was odd, because it was

The middle of the night.’

It’s odd indeed to see the sun shining at midnight and dark skies above bright sand. But it is also peculiar to see figures sunbathing, or moon-bathing, beneath skies full of giant cells, expanded like some kind of incoming menace. The same thing is happening in my sequence of crowded Dining Rooms, done concurrently for a solo show with my gallerist, Paul Stolper and ironically called Leisure Paintings. Here countless black-tie diners are seated beneath pitch darkness in which more large cells are poised, like chandeliers but not. As in the beaches the figures are overshadowed by a sci-fi or pandemic intrusion or as the poet R S Thomas puts it: “an unseen/ Power, whose sphere is the cell/And the electron”.

The big cell, poised near my figures, is a recurring image of threat or mystery and has been so since 2002 when I put it into some of my Andrew Marvell paintings. Marvell was interested in the new, 17thc science of microscopy. He plays around with scale, making insects seem bigger than humans and expanding tiny things like a dewdrop as if through a microscope. So I had the idea of accompanying my Marvell figures with cellular circles which then, in subsequent paintings, became big globules which I made by dropping washing-up liquid into a layer of damp acrylic. One tiny drop of detergent and a strange ball blooms out, a trick that became a go-to motif in much of my later work. After appearing as an army of pathogens in the Beaches and Dining Rooms these cells were a handy addition in my Covid sequence started during lockdown. Working in our improvised kitchen studio I used cardboard from delivery boxes and any spare paper to make piles of Covid drawings in which viruses were made visible and floated around hospital wards. But it was not just expanded germs that suggested something bizarre in these pictures, but all the medics in their hoods, masks, goggles and visors. I imagined their transformations to be especially nightmarish for people suffering from Covid hallucinations. An image that occurred to me was the jackal-headed Egyptian god Anubis, embalmer of the dead, bending over a figure, and I painted a series called ‘Bedside’ with weird, hooded doctors hanging over their patients. So it’s not just strange, acid lighting or clusters of bacteria that suggest the uncanny here, but the figures themselves and their metamorphoses.

This fascination with metamorphosis has been with me for ages. It was something I was scared of as a child if people put on sunglasses or hats or came out of the sea with wet hair. It is something I’m drawn to in literature, in Ovid, Dante, Marvell, Eliot, and it was the subject of my Phd on Shakespeare. I’ve always liked it in art (in Bosch, Salvador Dali or Sarah Lucas) and its been a big part of my own work since the 90s when I started making rapid drawings of people on the move. I took part in a project called Cab Gallery, devised by Paul Stolper and cab driver and art collector Jason Brown, in which artists showed work in the back of a London taxi. My contribution to this mobile gallery was a book of figure drawings made as the taxi drove me around the city, and because I was working so quickly, abbreviation and mutation were inevitable. Passersby ended up with arms like spikes, hands like hooks and blades or were fused together in one ungainly shape. They seemed extra fragile, comical, frightening or grotesque, an effect I liked and decided to develop when I was back in the studio. The result was that figures in my paintings started to morph into something other. They became monsters, ghosts, yetis, hybrids or things made strange with hoods, like Doctors and Explorers, or helmets like Samurai warriors, or festive costumes like Hens, Carnival revellers and Actors. This is Bottom from A Midsummer Nights Dream who is transformed into an ass.

So, metamorphosis in my work can be man or woman turned into yeti or animal or masquerader. One type of creature is changed into another. But it can also mean a figure eclipsed, shattered or dissolved, for example as light bursts upon it. In Riddled with Light or Siberia or Fiery Pegasus or Scorching Beams, veils of bright light mask or splinter the figures. Or in these paintings called Mutilates, a name I invented to mean both mutation and mutilation, something similar is happening from within as if they are like x-rays. These black and white paintings of semi-translucent beings are done in layers of watery acrylic that I tipped, tilted, poured and blew with a hairdryer to suggest the insides of the body. The paint is allowed to flood over contours indicating someone in a kind of collapse, and not just physical but psychological collapse, since the two are so closely related. And this kind of meltdown has been a constant in my paintings of figures like the Shoppers, Travelling Groups, Sunbathers and especially those Diners who are grotesquely morphing in the middle of posh events. Eliot’s poems are once more a source here, especially his poetry of social unease like The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock where tongue-tied Prufrock muses that “I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas”. This ridiculous image of the civilised J Alfred (or his erudite creator Eliot) becoming a crab or lobster is one I particularly like and so my dining rooms show executives and captains of industry also mutating, if not into shellfish, into distorted forms. The neat structure of white tablecloths is set against people becoming dysfunctional shapes or even molecular drops at the back of the picture as if everything there is reverting to a kind of biomorphic soup. They are becoming what they are eating, rather embarrassing, especially at such high-end gatherings. Then equally embarrassing are the goings on in my processions of dignitaries falling apart at state occasions as in Westminster Abbey or the Houses of Parliament. These are from a series called ‘Queen and Country’ done for the Art Car Boot fair a few years ago with bishops, mayors, judges and royalty leaking and squirting amid the splendour of pomp and ceremony. The anguished quote from Shakespeare’s Henry V, ‘O Ceremony show me but thy worth’ was an inspiration here as was the more recent concept of the abject. Unruly bodies are erupting beneath robes and regalia as if these figures are not grandees at all but studies in abjection, a topic I’m drawn to and to which I’m constantly returning.

To abject is to push away anything gross, shameful or disgusting. Dirt, excrement, vomit, rotting food. However, these figures in Processions or Dining Rooms are not just getting rid of their waste since they are themselves in radical disarray, not in control of their bodies. They are themselves abject. The abject therefore is not just what we reject and throw in the bin or down the drain, it can be us, ourselves. Whole groups of people like sex workers or prisoners have been considered abject in the past, as discussed by the philosopher Michel Foucault, and we can all be thought of in this way if we are outside social norms or propriety, beyond the pale as creatures of horror or disgust. And women it seems are especially vulnerable, considered abject if we don’t conform to certain norms of femininity or as we age, as in the recent body-horror film, The Substance. Here in an attempt to stay young a woman disintegrates into a monstrous heap of flesh.

These ideas about the abject have been explored in film, philosophy, literature and psychoanalysis, notably by philosopher and analyst Julia Kristeva in her book Powers of Horror. Here she writes about a child’s need to abject the maternal body in order to enter the adult world of language and society. The child must separate itself from its mother who is seen as primitive and chaotic. And so, abject par excellence, icons of abjection, are my big women called Plumpers, inspired partly by Kristeva, partly by overweight sunbathers I saw on Berck-Plage in northern France and also by many misogynistic lines in literature, in Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Sartre, Marvell, Spenser, Eliot, Swift, the list goes on, and not forgetting early Christian thinkers who blame women for everything that has gone wrong since Eve gave Adam the apple. For example the 2nd century theologian Tertullian allegedly said that ‘woman is a temple built over a sewer’. Or Thomas Aquinas, anticipating Freudian castration anxiety, said that ‘woman is a mutilated man’.

These quotes always used to upset me and after brooding on them for years I started to make work coloured by them: tainted by them if you like. In 2005 I came across a porn magazine called Plumpers and I based a lot of paintings on its images, changing their winking, seductive poses into women who seemed isolated and marooned. I gave them unwieldy, disorderly bodies with paint running and spilling everywhere a bit like the woman in The Substance. However, as I painted them, one after another, I began to see them in a rather different way so that they seemed less gross, less abject and more like assertive, jubilant survivors. My pictures began to relate not so much to Kristeva as to Barbara Creed’s book The Monstrous Feminine, in which the abjected woman takes revenge on her patriarchal oppressors. And while Creed sees her women as triumphantlymonstrous, becoming witches, wolves and vampires, my Plumpers referenced monumental goddesses from classical or Celtic myth; the Callieach, meaning hag, but a divine hag, associated with raw energy and the creation of landscape. Or Brigid, Irish goddess of fertility, surrounded here by whirling egg-cells, streams of plasma and striking an exuberant pose. And my revised view of these Plumpers was not just because I upgraded some of them as deities, but because the painterly gusto with which I made them suggested liberation and ebullience. Their spreading flesh and streaming fluids seemed to me to be ecstatic, carnivalesque. Their mess, as in Cy Twombly’s Bacchanalia paintings and lots of his other work with its scribbles and smears, is a joyous bursting out of restraint. He is one of my favourite painters by the way, a preference I share with Maggi Hambling.

And so to this topic of Mess which has been bubbling away in a cauldron beneath what I have already said. In my Bathers, Diners, Shoppers, Explorers and many other series, I have a great fondness for poured, spilt, dropped, dripped, blown, swiped and smeared paint that I call Mess but which has, I think, different intentions and effects in different contexts. It can be festive and elated as in some of the Plumpers or in these paintings of Bacchanalian revellers or it can stress abjection and ruin as in the Diners, Bathers or Horsemen. However, in all these different pictures mess signifies mutation and metamorphosis. It smashes limits and destroys established forms in order to expand and reveal new territory. It is creatively destructive reminding me of Roland Barthes' distinction (in his book The Pleasure of the Text) between literary works that offer mere pleasure, ie closure and order, and those that are excessive, fragmented, disruptive and give us “jouissance” or bliss. Paraphrasing Barthes, his text of jouissance discomforts and unsettles the reader in an “infinite opening out” since more is always possible. There can be no closure. Unlike the text that just gives us pleasure, Barthes’ jouissance is eruptive, unstable, messy and so for me it has parallels with the idea of painterly mess. 

Mess then is my signature dish and has been with me ever since I disliked exact measuring as a way of life-painting at the Byam Shaw. And over the last few years I have developed it, finding new ways in which to exploit it in my series of work inspired by journeys on the London Tube.

My Underground series began in 2023 when I took daily journeys on the District Line and did drawings of seated figures, distorting them as before through the pressure of working. I had to draw at top speed before people got off or saw me staring at them, and as in my earlier work, they became moon-eyed, paper thin or bird-legged and I liked these transformations, the way the passengers seemed so rickety, eccentric or menacing.

Their odd shapes, gestures and expressions also reminded me of figures in different kinds of mythological underworld, and I began to think about the underground as a metaphor for the underworld, obviously because both are subterranean but also because the underworld is a place where people are changed. My drawings reminded me of literary underworlds where metamorphosis, people turned into bodies new and strange, is so often a feature, whether in poetry, myth or in the psychological underworld of the unconscious.

Examples of this include Dante’s Inferno, Vergil’s Aeneid, Eliot’s Waste Land and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Dante’s thieves are turned into snakes, Vergil’s underworld contains ‘monstrous forms of various beasts’, Eliot’s Waste Land, prefaced by the underworld guardian, the Cumean Sibyl, includes many disturbing mutations and Alice, when she falls down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, grows bigger and smaller and meets singing flowers or the smoking caterpillar. Lewis Carroll’s novel is also a dream story and can be interpreted as a descent into the unconscious where again metamorphosis is key. In Freud’s dream interpretation, for example, the unconscious transforms, edits and compresses its material. Or Jung, discussing his waking exploration of mental depths, says ‘I have become a monstrous animal form for which I have exchanged my humanity’. His own underworld is a bit like Vergil’s in The Aeneid.

So the underworld and metamorphosis go together and my Tube drawings were the basis for figures that became more and more outlandish as I made them into paintings. I did many on found cardboard and packaging and more on large bits of torn, unstretched canvas I called ‘Rags’. This name was a reference to John Donne’s phrase ‘rags of time’ or WB Yeats’s line ‘the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’ since both quotes seemed apt for dishevelled urban life and for work in which mess played its significant part. With the paintings on cardboard I worked on the floor and then picked them up allowing drips and streams to fall on neighbouring pictures. Then with the big Rags I also worked flat then tipped and shook the canvases so that oily paint swept across surfaces, or pools of acrylic ran off in skitters leaving Pollock-like patterns of lines and dots.

As in earlier paintings my fluid paint suggests people in meltdown. The metamorphic mess represents the body or the emotions. But I also embarked on another kind of metamorphosis in which the mixed media used in the painting refuses to submit to representation. I began to foreground my materials, allowing them to detach themselves from the image and drawing attention to themselves rather than serving depiction. Increasingly I let paint, charcoal, pencil, pastel etc assert themselves independently as stuff, undermining bodies and faces with lines, blots, pools and veils and sometimes becoming more dominant than the image itself. You might wonder why, why on earth unpick and destroy in this way. It’s difficult enough to resolve a painting so why try and spoil it. For me, however, this technique is meant to increase a sense of human fragility. It is a metaphor for being pulled apart by matter, by indifferent forces as if the physical and material are dethroning the helpless man or woman. The intrusive lines, veils of paint, flung blots, threads of cotton sticking to the canvas or the printed surface of the cardboard packaging dramatise the tension between a figure trying to come into existence and materials which assert themselves against it so that human identity is threatened.

But I don't always treat my Tube figures so badly. I don’t always degrade or attack them in this way because on occasion something different occurs to me as they evolve and as certain shapes evolve with them. I have talked about mess as carnival and mess as defacement but I have also nurtured a third kind of mess which is mess as mystery, by which I mean abstract, enigmatic shapes floating around my figures. This is an extension of something I have done before, in August or Forest of Frost or Tourist on Tower Bridge where people are accompanied by unidentifiable clusters or structures. These illogical shapes are a bit like my cells but more obscure, pushing the named towards the unnameable, the familiar towards the unfamiliar and the recognisable towards what has been called in critical theory, the "unpresentable".

This term is from the philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard pondering aspects of existence that exceed representation. They are, he writes, unpresentable, overwhelming and as he describes it, sublime. It’s like the idea of an ineffable God in Negative Theology. But by indicating this impossibility, artists, writers as well as religious thinkers can communicate the idea of a beyond that remains unexpressed. Eliot writes that ‘words strain, crack and sometimes break under the burden’, but he exploits their inadequacy through cracked, broken, fragmented poetry in The Waste Land. He leaves gaps and fissures that indicate what can’t be fully expressed. It’s a bit like Roland Barthes’ idea of an unstable, disruptive text which can never claim to be finished and doesn’t pretend to be complete. And for Lyotard it is not just words that cannot completely capture existence, painting also has to admit to the unpresentable. And as with Eliot’s broken poetry, visual art can fruitfully reveal its limitations by not representing, an idea which for Lyotard is embedded in certain kinds of abstraction and minimalism, especially in the work of Barnett Newman about which he has written extensively.

Barnett Newman’s work leaves me a bit cold I’m afraid but I am inspired by the idea of the unpresentable which for me is expressed by paintings in which the nameless contrasts with the named, a nameless ‘thing’ is painted next to a discernible figure, for example the shadowy shapes and the splat in Bacon’s Portrait of George Dyer or the tangled lines coming out of the naked figure in Kitaj’s The Ohio Gang. Looking at these smears or tangles, I think ‘what on earth are these? Why are they here?’ The clear and rational falters and collapses into what is outside comprehension. And my attraction to these oddities has inspired me to bring them into my own painting, in August, Forest of Frost etc and most recently in my Underground series. The Tube figures are surrounded by nameless floaters and filaments and since these encircle or sprout from the head they suggest mental activity: what lurks beneath consciousness, what escapes language or even some kind of indescribable visionary experience. The person sitting silently on the tube with her eyes shut sometimes looks as if she is in contemplation and the shapes and lines that I painted around such figures reminded me of a manuscript illustration by the Benedictine mystic, Hildegard of Bingen as she receives a vision of the Holy Spirit with flames gripping her head. I therefore called this picture Hildegard.

So, to recap, I paint figures who leave behind the customary and familiar. They are outside the homely, or heimlich. I’m thinking here of Freud in his essay on the unheimlich or uncanny. My figures are not your regular guys, or girls, but people transformed into abjects, ghosts, goddesses, monsters etc. and their transformations are made with the painterly smears and spills that I call Mess. However there’s another branch of my work which neither depicts human figures nor uses painterly mess although it is still very much concerned with creatures outside the homely and domestic. And so I'm going to end my talk far away from humanity with my paintings of animals and other non-human creatures.

‘The Gold Room’, a painting of a dining room, is obviously very different from my other dining room pictures. There’s no conversation or champagne or dinner jackets here, just a monkey on a table, reminding us of absent human conventions by its defiant presence. It is a nod to Jean-Paul Sartre and his distinction between Being-in-itself and Being-for-itself. His Being-in-itself refers to the way animals simply exist, without self-consciousness, as opposed to Being-for-itself which is human self-awareness, speech and responsibility. Humans must choose what to make of themselves and how to present themselves while animals cannot help being what they are. It’s a theme that recurs in literature, in Marvell, WH Auden and emphatically in DH Lawrence where snakes, cats, rabbits, tortoises, horses etc represent singular and absolute being, so different from humans who are full of concealment and self-consciousness.

And I have noticed that I paint animals and birds in a different way from my figures so that the disintegration and mess are absent. My creatures are done without the poured paint and hurling of blots that undo my figures but are made instead with decisive marks expressing spontaneity and vigour. These were for a show at the Royal Geographical Society about Inuit culture and polar exploration. They are of endangered Greenlandic species made on cardboard which I pulled out of bins as a small eco gesture: Snowy Owl, Seal, Arctic fox, Arctic hare and Arctic Shark, my favourite, which can grow up to 7 metres long, live for over 500 years (so one alive today could have been around at the time of Henry VIII) and with pregnancy lasting from 8-18 years. I made them around the same time as these polar explorers but there is quite a difference. While the explorers are crushed and worn down by sickness and weather the wolves and owls are well-formed and assertive. They look complete while my flailing figures struggle to exist as solid and coherent. It’s a bit like the contrast between the streamlined goshawk and grief-stricken, crumpled Helen in the film ‘H is for Hawk.’ 

However, despite being a flailing human myself, when painting animals I sometimes feel an almost shamanic identification with their spontaneity, alertness or aggressiveness. I became interested in shamans and their connection to other creatures when researching Inuit culture for the RGS and though it’s absurd to claim kinship with real shamans, I know that several artists, Joseph Beuys or Leonora Carrington for example, have used shamanism in their work. And for me a relationship with bird and animal subjects seems to fit with an impulsive life in the studio, away from conversation and society, where I can express raw or aggressive feelings like the hyena in Carrington’s story, The Debutante. Or the macaque flicking its tail on the dining table. I feel especially drawn (not surprisingly) to our fellow primates and have a range of gibbons, tarsiers, baboons, lorises, lemurs and macaques in my repertoire. While we burdened humans are trudging along the ground the monkeys are perched above or running along branches or leaping through the jungle under a canopy of vegetation. They are like the winged gods in Plato’s dialogue The Phaedrus flying above humans who are tethered to the earth.

This series of Flamboyant Jungle paintings are in those artificial, sherbet colours which I’ve used over the years in all kinds of work and which have different effects depending on context. I was drawn to them originally when looking at modern urban life and the synthetic colours of superstores, shopping malls, casinos, massive cruise ships and luxury hotel foyers as well as their pink cocktails and lemon cakes and confections. I noticed that these places and their merchandise seduce us with infantile colours that are pastel and opaque. You cannot see through the dense, creamy surfaces which may mask something cheap or toxic. I’ve always liked Pop Art and they’re like Wayne Thiebaud’s thickly painted cakes that look luscious while hiding harmful, ultra-processed contents. I therefore wanted to use these sickly effects in my Supermarket, Icon of the Seas, Casino, New Build and Hotel Corridor paintings and also in Grimms’ Fairy Tale pictures of the sugar house in Hansel and Gretel or of forest mushrooms which look pretty but are deadly poisonous. My idea was to paint places and things that are misleadingly seductive with their buttery colours and textures.

However these synthetic, candy colours have a different source and intention in my tropical jungles. These paintings are glaringly unreal. They make the forest look very artificial it’s true, like something from a Disney film. But for me the artifice is not there to suggest commercial cover-up or manipulation but to conjure a world made new and fantastical. And my influences here were not the saccharine confections of the leisure industry but landscapes of Indian, specifically Hindu, miniatures with their sour-sweet, cool-as-a-cucumber colours depicting gardens with gods and goddesses in a bejewelled, artificial style: like the elephant god Ganesh on a lotus or Radha and Krishna in a garden or the monkey god Hanuman. Their artifice is not there to deceive or conceal but to evoke somewhere better than here, somewhere out of this world, which reminds me of the philosopher Sonia Sikka’s words about Plato’s Phaedrus and beauty. ‘For Plato’, she writes, ‘the beautiful portrays an ideal that is more real than anything actual and inspires longing for this half remembered realm in which this ideal is real.’ The artificial therefore is not necessarily something dishonest but something transcendent. In this sense it is not inferior to the natural but a metaphor for something outside and beyond it.

Like the Beaches or Covids then these Flamboyant Jungle paintings depict worlds made strange. They pull everyday reality towards something other, though unlike the Beaches or Covids, it is meant to be joyous rather than disconcerting. They are my attempt at painting a paradise which is not of this world, an idea that was brought to my attention when I was doing a residency at a monastery in Yorkshire and the abbot commented on the chimp flinging itself through the branches. He said ‘the ape knows joy,’ and then in scathing tones, ‘we won’t, not till we get to the kingdom of heaven’. Maybe, who knows. But we can at least invoke such ecstatic, joyful feelings. The title ‘Flamboyant jungle’ is taken from ‘Nomad Exquisite’, a poem by Wallace Stevens about a tropical forest. He asks that nature which creates such teeming life in the tropical forest in Florida, also fills him with flame-like or flamboyant inspiration. And so I’d like to end with his poetic invocation since as artists I think we can all do with some of this sort of thing. He writes 

As the immense dew of Florida

Brings forth

The big-finned palm

And green vine angering for life,

As the immense dew of Florida

Brings forth hymn and hymn

From the beholder,

Beholding all these green sides

And gold sides of green sides,

And blessed mornings,

Meet for the eye of the young alligator,

And lightning colors

So, in me, come flinging

Forms, flames, and the flakes of flames.