Artist statement
Drawing on the language of 17th century Dutch art with it’s readymade gravitas - mortality, fragility, ostentation - I have been staging narratives using digital collage, photography, kitsch objects, fairies and animated vegetables, investigating the tension between high and low art.
My cultural heritage is reflected in the paintings, a blend of Polish exotica and Cockney humour, which influences the work both atmospherically, emotively and aesthetically. Lockdown 2020 gave me time to take an in-depth look at the flora and fauna of the domestic garden and to reevaluate it as subject matter alongside art historical sources. I now grow and photograph my own flowers, using the bouquet as a stage or backdrop, and intertwine my daily living with my art practice.

Fairies
In my recent work I have been staging narratives using digital collage, photographs, oversized flowers, kitsch objects, fairies and animated vegetables. Mostly growing the flowers I paint, I use the bouquet as a stage or garden for allegorical narratives to tell a story and hopefully capture something of the enchantment in the undergrowth.
The aggressive fairies are a response to the well known photograph of a bare chested Putin riding a horse, epitomising to me the hyper-macho posturing prevalent in today’s politics. The symbolic shrinking of violence and aggression to a minimal size renders it harmless.

Uncle Vanya
Uncle Vanya is one of a series of paintings I made that combine to form a fake family tree. It alludes both to my Polish and Eastern European family roots and to a rosy and unrealistic view I formed about my father’s homeland and family and of the exotic romance of pre-war Poland. My father came to the UK as a displaced person and my Polish family being unknowable I had to fill in the missing parts, the mystique being increased by having a DNA test performed.