Bent Straight, Straight Bend

Opening at Five Walls Gallery on Friday 6 February 2026

Exhibition Statement

Bent Straight, Straight Bend brings together a body of paintings shaped by a deliberate tension between control and release. Although the works may initially read as precise, even machine-like, each is made outdoors, where conditions introduce an unavoidable lack of control. This is intentional. The paintings are constructed through processes that invite unpredictability, allowing humanness to quietly disrupt order.

Before painting, I spend time with the shape - listening, waiting, trying to tune into what it might suggest rather than imposing a fixed idea upon it. As layers of coloured ground are applied, I pause again to watch and reconsider: its form, its weight, its possible meanings. A painting may pass through several colours and compositions, accumulating decisions, hesitations and reversals along the way.

The works begin with a source, but they do not remain loyal to it. As the process unfolds, the paintings move away from translation and towards abstraction, absorbing multiple references that enter the conversation between shape, memory and material. I ask what the shape recalls, what colour it wants to be, and how far it is willing to bend away from its origins.

Rather than pursuing a preconceived mental image, I try to let those expectations fall away. What remains is a dialogue between painting and process, where the shape can assert itself - sometimes insisting on a different surface treatment, sometimes resisting resolution.

In this space between bent and straight, intention and accident, the work finds its own uneasy balance.