Sometimes a queer heart breaks later in life as maybe we do not have the same teenage experiences as many others!! I think mine has been breaking since birth!! Not in relation to sadness but to feeling-deeply and to otherness.

My creative antenna has at last become fine tuned to these feelings of love and loneliness of pleasure and pain, defiance, sensitivity and yes of course heartbreak in the truest sense. It is then through my work that I am finally able to work through and express these unearthed feelings from the past and the present.

The paintings offer a dream like quality with at times details rendered to bring them into focus at other times more abstract gestures represent the fading in and out of consciousness, like a dream they oscillate between different thoughts and emotions the chaotic nature of the work makes it sometimes easier (as in our dreams) to interpret individual parts and motifs.

The work holds a clear duality, at times (but not always) bright, colourful, and playful surfaces sit alongside titles and underlying messages that point to the simultaneous joy and pain of being alive. This tension reflects something deeply familiar within the gay experience: the act of masking, where brightness and humour can operate as protection while vulnerability and struggle remain partially concealed.

The paintings move through opposing and in-between states:

Feast / Famine

Wet / Dry

Motormouth / Mute

Slut / Celibate

High / Sober

Push / Pull

In / Out

These pairings are less about contradiction than coexistence. They describe emotional weather, bodily experience, desire, restraint, excess, silence, and survival.

I view the world through the lens of lived experience, and the paintings function as a meeting point between past, present, and imagined futures. Comedy and tragedy sit side by side, sometimes tender, sometimes sharp, often irreverent, and at other moments quietly reflective. Feelings of otherness, release, longing, and reconciliation with oneself recur throughout the work, appearing as repeated figures, borrowed lyrics, fragments of memory, and staged scenarios. Together, they form a personal visual language shaped by my experience as a gay/queer, lapsed Catholic brought up in Glasgow’s East End and later reborn on the dance floor at Óptimo.

Ultimately, the paintings are acts of recognition and attempt to understand how love, loss, faith, shame, pleasure, and resilience can occupy the same space.