The initial mark-making was made in collaboration with Lisa Elde. Constructing a ‘body envelope’ out of the Canon Double Matte drafting film, Lisa climbed inside and quickly grasped the instinctive interaction between us. The drafting film recorded the push/response/conflict of the oil pastels between us, and thus became the interface on which our collaboration played out.
The much longer period during which the drawing became a painting played out with the effects and feelings triggered by a recent gastroscopy permeating my psychology. A gastroscopy is a strange intimate journey, where the boundaries between the clinical world and our internal wilderness disappears. What emerged is a painting which explores themes of biology, interiority and fragmentation of the human form. It functions as a visual poem of what lies beneath the skin.
The vertical, elongated shapes suggest the oesophagus, spine, or digestive tract. The fleshy palette of ochre, deep crimson, and bruised purple mimics the colours of living tissue, muscle, and membrane. The semi-transparent substrate (drafting film) creates a ‘haze’ that feels like looking through an endoscope or seeing a body through the blur of sedation. You can see ‘skeletal’ or segmented forms that feel like bone or cartilage, contrasted with more fluid, scribbled blue lines that suggest nervous energy, veins, or perhaps the ‘interference’ of pain and sensation.
The way the shapes are suspended in a white, sterile space mimics how a patient feels on an operating table—isolated and observed.
This work treats the inside of the body as a landscape – our interiors are not just ‘guts’, but complex, beautiful, and slightly chaotic terrains. It strips away the recognisable ‘person’ and leaves behind the raw machinery of the body.
By breaking the body into these floating, unrecognisable parts, I am exploring how medical intervention makes us feel ‘disassembled’—less like a whole person and more like a collection of parts being examined.
