Andy sees his art practice as confronting uncertainty and creating meaning through attention, experience and the physical act of making.
Andy's practice explores the relationship between human experience, nature and image-making, and the ways we use images to understand both ourselves and the world around us.
An early influence on his thinking was the developmental stages of children's artistic expression: how instinctive marks gradually develop into recognisable forms, symbols and increasingly complex visual languages. This led to a broader interest in creativity as a fundamental human impulse - our need to make, find patterns, construct meaning and give form to experiences that can be difficult to articulate.
This interest is closely connected to existentialism. Andy is drawn to the idea that meaning is not simply given to us, but is something we continually construct through our choices, actions and encounters with the world. To Andy, making art is part of that process.
Over the years this has taken his work through mythology, psychology, alternative histories and internet conspiracy culture, often exploring the uncertain territory between what we see, what we believe and what we imagine. Although these subjects can appear very different, Andy sees them as connected by the human impulse to interpret the unknown and construct systems of meaning.
Andy's recent return to painting has brought these questions back to his physical experience of making. Nature has become increasingly important, not as something he necessarily wants to represent literally, but as a source of atmosphere, sensation and reflection. He is interested in the legacy of Impressionism and its attempt to capture an experience of looking rather than simply describe a subject. Elements within the paintings can suggest water, vegetation, light or landscape without fully resolving into representation, allowing the viewer's own perception and associations to become part of the work.
At the same time, I find myself making paintings at a moment when artificial intelligence can generate increasingly convincing images almost instantaneously. Rather than rejecting this technology, it has made me think more deeply about what remains distinctive about the human act of making.
I work intuitively with mixed media, building surfaces through paint, sawdust, spray paint, drawing and repeated processes of addition and removal. Images emerge gradually through accumulated decisions. I scrape back, obscure, rediscover and alter forms, allowing accidents and material resistance to influence what happens next. The surface retains evidence of this process - time, uncertainty, revision and touch. The paintings are arrived at rather than simply produced.
The existential dimension of the work is particularly important here. Making becomes a way of being present: a physical encounter with materials in which meaning develops through the process rather than being predetermined. At a time when images can be produced without physical experience, I am increasingly drawn towards the opposite - slowness, materiality, uncertainty and the imperfect traces of human decisions.
These paintings mark the beginning of a renewed and continuing body of work through which I want to explore what it means to make, experience and find meaning in images in an increasingly artificial visual world.