The story behind the painting In The Clearing, unfolds quietly and over time. 

After an extended period of working on highly structured, heavily laboured paintings, work emerged late at night, using a myriad of colours already mixed for an earlier body of work. They were painted quickly, almost instinctively, in a moment when I could access my inner world, or inner landscape, if you will.

When I returned to the painting months later, I realised it was far more aligned with what I was truly feeling than the more controlled works that preceded them. This painting carries a sense of urgency: a call to hasten our search for more sustainable ways to inhabit this planet and to leave a significantly lighter footprint. This urgency is echoed in the speed of their making and in the delicacy, even fragility, of the mark-making.

I have heard other painters, such as the great Stanley Whitney, speak of this phenomenon of entering a fertile, unconscious state that often arises late at night, at the end of a long studio session.

In the Clearing were made in 2023 and marked a significant shift in my practice. From this point onward, my colour palette began to lighten, and my mark-making became more fluid, more breathable.

More recently, I encountered images of early works by Rothko in a book at the Tate Modern bookshop, paintings made before his widely recognised abstraction and search for transcendence. My own journey, or dance, with abstraction has since evolved into a deeply personal visual language, incorporating abstracted Hangul and more densely marked, stitched-together surfaces, what I now think of as the skin of the painting.

This painting, along with the painting Innermost, formed a tunnel through which I was able to travel toward another destination within my practice. This sense of interiority and emergence is also carried in their titles, Innermost and In the Clearing, suggesting both a turning inward and the quiet arrival at an open space.