I felt like I had reached the end of a period of life, where the work was jumping about and pushing something new every time. I wanted to dial it back and create a language that was stable and deep.

The moment is never perfect. It's like that right now - in my head I'm being super lucid, but you never are. You're always fumbling.

I'm a quiet person, I'm not a flashy art world person. I'm in the studio in the middle of nowhere. There's sheep and fields. The work has to be authentic in that way.

Using painting as a metaphor for consciousness is what I'm interested in.

There are absences, but there are also presences. It's about how painting can evolve its own abstractions. I didn't know the painting was going to be about that, but it has to have that journey; I have to learn something, I have to end up somewhere I didn't expect to be, otherwise, I don't think it's painting.

Small thoughts grow into a picture. It may suggest an individual or it may suggest a place, but generally the painting's job is to work that [idea] into an abstract proposition that is completely removed from the starting point.

There are things that inform the works, but that doesn't go anywhere near what you're actually looking at.