A subversive ‘occupation’ of the painting process, the studio, and of the viewer’s gaze. Flags inform the semiotic structure of this ‘occupied’ space by presenting, or ‘showing’, signs of identity. Camouflage, in opposition, ‘hides’ or conceals these. Entwined in my work, these elements of ‘showing and hiding’, present my practice as a process of selection, arrangement and substitution.

The visual hybrid which emerges as a focus for my work, draws on a research context consisting of the rough ‘edges’ of painting, contemporary fashion and subcultural style. These cultural forms are viewed through the lens of the structuring and deconstructive processes employed in flag making and camouflaging. This appropriation – the transference of iconography and concept across discipline – is central to my work.

My practice questions the materials, grounds and outcomes of painting and – as such – reform its process to my ends. These ‘guerrilla’ tactics suggest symbolic advances, which also retreat from signification. Forming this ‘occupied zone’ – to be uneasily re-occupied by the viewer – enables an ‘art strategy’, which intensifies the struggle to identify.

I have built up a way of thinking – and a set of procedures – which allows mobility between the materials I choose, their formatting and their possible significations. These materials may reference elements of the landscape, and the sense of ‘subversive’ activity involved with ‘occupation’, but they also reference these tactics in relation to the traditional formats and mediums of painting. You could say my artworks occupy the ‘space of painting’ (stretcher, canvas, portrait of landscape rectangles, wall hanging), in the same spirit as the events I initiated, which ‘occupied’ site specific landscape locations, to make these into ‘paintings’, through photography and video.

At times, the materials I use overwhelm any figurative or ‘subject-matter’ connotations, especially when they ‘camouflage’ the stretchers and stretched ‘canvasses’ (usually substituted by felt, or wool). At other times, the positioning of these material elements, initiate or adapt to the regulatory and denotive organisation of flags. They take up positions on the ‘field’ of the stretcher, or video screen. It is this play of potential signification – alongside its dispersal into formal patterns or structures – which allows a continuous dialogue, between forms and meanings and between viewer and artwork, to evolve in my work.