The brain is a pattern-hunter. Before you have finished looking, it has already begun to make sense of what it sees, pulling shape from shadow, reading posture from a partial silhouette, recognising the particular pause of a cat before it moves on.

The Shape of Things works with that instinct. Each painting in this first edition, Creatures, begins with an observation from the natural world: a bird glimpsed mid-flight, an animal stilled at the edge of a garden, a shape moving through trees. What arrives on the canvas is not a record of what was there, but a rendering of the moment of recognition, layered acrylic and collage building the familiar from the unfamiliar, form emerging from what might first appear to be chaos.

These are paintings about looking closely, and about the quiet intelligence of the mind as it works. Rooted in everyday encounters, garden birds, neighbourhood animals, the peripheral flicker of something wild, they invite you to slow down, look again, and find the creature that was there all along.

Edition 1: Creatures is the first in an ongoing series. Each edition explores a new territory of the observed world through the same lens: partial information, pattern recognition, and the strangely satisfying moment when chaos resolves into something known.

There is more held energy in inanimate objects than we credit. The Not So Still Life collection begins with this thought, that still life is not so still after all.

Objects get moved, nudged while cleaning, rearranged for dinner, quietly forgotten or passed around the table. Vessels that once held tea, flowers or keys find their way to the back of a cupboard, or on to someone else entirely. Yet something of their presence lingers, in memory, in habit, in the space they leave behind.

These works explore that held energy, the layered history of ordinary objects, and the way materials themselves, drawing showing through paint, collage fragments surfacing beneath, can speak to what lies beneath the surface of familiar things.

For this body of work, I was  observing the rapid changing profile of the rural UK landscape: building sites, fencing, bridges, roads, the slow assimilation of green space into infrastructure, sitting uneasily side by side with what remains untouched.

This suite traces the transformation of a workshop site into a garden, a shift from labour and demolition towards ecology and renewal, all the while tracking the changing light of the seasons. Along the way, overlooked presences became central: scaffolding casting improbable silhouettes, wheelbarrows stacked and repurposed, bags of rubble accumulating like temporary monuments. Ordinary tools creating new forms as the weather and light shifts.

The paintings are not depictions but layered impressions. Transparent washes, scaffold-like grids, and gestural sweeps mark out a place in flux, caught between dismantling and reimagining. The palette moves from the bright, acidic tones of spring growth pressing against residue, to the darker registers of night or indeed the weather, when forms dissolve into shadow.

Together, the works map a threshold, between demolition and nature, function and imagination. They dwell in the tension of a tipping point: the fragile moment when a building site becomes something else.