JACKSON’S PAINTING PRIZE 2023 I’m thrilled that two of my paintings A reckoning of before and after and Jenga Twins have been longlisted for the Jackson’s Painting Prize 2023

These paintings, which were part of Ecologies of Displacement, were inspired by the discovery of photographs of my childhood Ohio home which was up for sale on the internet. The photographs showed that the house had hardly changed since the early 70’s when my parents sold it. The empty rooms became a stage set where personal and historical events (the Vietnam War, Kent State, the Cuyahoga River fire) overlap. Each painting created on stretched linen, has a substrate which is a page from a recent Scottish newspaper. Each work is associated with a memory or event either personal or political, sometimes both, a displacement through time. In my work I am searching for the ghost stories that exist in real life – our haunted existence in a fragmented world.