History has echoes which teach a great deal about the world at present. History connects the past to the present helping us to understand how our world - and we - came to be. Insights about the present can be gained from looking at the world historically.

I use my own echoes, my history, memories and observations through drawing, photographs and films and then archive them in paint but add and subtract until I arrive at a present construct. I also use other people’s: the echoes they left behind so I can look at eras and cultures different to mine.

This starting image may be well known but more commonly not. Some relate to specific moments in time, an event or a fashion which becomes echoed in a painting. My technical approach is broadly twofold: one where the image is subjected to revisions and veils of paint. It then becomes an echo, a palimpsest of what it once was, and conceals to slowly reveal. The other is by incremental additions: an image of accumulative echoes rather than effacement. They both tell unforeseen stories.

I also use my memory and draw rapidly, based upon something seen. But memory is a flawed thing and as slippery as paint. Even my attempts to pinpoint a visual memory by repetition in the same painting reveal imperfections: it echoes but doesn’t replicate. In addition, there are paintings which use the same image source. A slight change of viewpoint, a change in technique or dimensions makes for a very different painting - an imperfect mirroring, an echo.

That an image can be mirrored and my fascination with them as objects is reflected in the paintings where mirrors are present. They can be a flip side to a scene but also offer a different vantage point, a reversal. Mirrors show us ourselves: they are an echo of ourselves but not as we are seen by others.