My work has been described as ‘Post Digital’ and ‘Low Fi’ which I like. For me Post Digital is about exploring our human relationship with digital. Digital and emerging technologies can be confusing and overwhelming, and as a post digital artist, I try and grasp a basic understanding and overview of the digital landscape, without becoming a specialist or master of any specific technology.

Art Process:

I've been making physical mesh paintings for several years; a process like screen printing, that came from playful attempts to manually replicate the offset lithography printing process used to print billboard posters (before they all went digital).

I push acrylic paint through perforated aluminum mesh, dry the paint, remove/poke out parts of the dry paint and then repeat by pushing a new colour layer of paint through the exposed holes, until I have a desired image. I work from behind and I don’t see the image until after the paint has been pushed through the holes. I use paper templates to help guide the image, which is mostly representational imagery. The process restricts expressive or gestural movements, it’s a mechanical process. I enjoy the challenge and constraints of the process and the tension between mechanical and human, handmade.

Paint to Pixels:

I stopped making physical mesh paintings for some time due to a lack of space and material supply. A couple of years ago I started to explore a digital mesh painting approach.

For this, I created a digital perforated grid, which replicates the IRL aluminum mesh I use in my physical mesh paintings. I use this digital grid as my main template in VR where I push individual digital bush strokes through the mesh holes of the template. This provides a complete single colour mesh painting I can work on in Blender 3D.

I spend most of my time in Blender 3D, editing the mesh, changing colours, position, perspectives, shapes and sizes until I have a desired outcome, which is then rendered as an image, video, GIF animation or exported as a glTF model. Occasionally, I experiment further with machine/deep learning tools. The process is not too dissimilar to my physical mesh painting technique, but the digital process provides a lot more flexibility and endless potential for experimentation.

I make work which includes both digital mesh and digital paint together, but I also make work which only includes digital mesh or digital paint strokes. The digital mesh paintings are mostly abstract, but my previous non-digital work and mesh paintings were all figurative or representational.

A lot of my art influences are from artists making sculptural works and the digital mesh paintings provide an opportunity to work in 3D space for the first time, which has opened a whole new area of experimentation.

My general art practice has an ongoing interest in how we visualize memories of the past, people, places, objects and things that have come to the end of their lives, appear and disappear, or are unobtainable or defunct. How we make new from old. As my digital mesh paintings develop, I will start to experiment more with figurative and representational works.