This series dwells in that fragile space where remedies cannot quite repair us, where memory blurs and the body aches, where the hunger for more wrestles with our will to live.

I began with a blister-pack of paracetamol, a panacea for most post-celebratory ills. From this starting point grew a collection of supposed hangover ‘cures’ — whispered remedies, lucky rituals, and small superstitions.
Each painting hums with a high, pale brightness, bathed in the weak light of morning, yet tinged with a greenish haze of queasiness. I want to speak to self-doubt, to the recognition of my own frailty, to the way my euphoria is always shadowed by inevitability.

Titles, for me, are an essential part of my practice so I extend this ambiguity: ‘Strange are the tricks of memory’, ‘A distorted reflection of self’, ‘Not all days are equal’. They acknowledge my humanity, the desire to live fiercely, with abandon and in the moment and how this is always followed by a reckoning, by the recognition of how quickly the high of the night recedes to a dull exhaustion of another dawn.

The irony is irresistible too: our so-called antidotes set against still life’s enduring reminder, ‘memento mori’ — remember that you must die. The hangover cure, with all its promises of renewal, points back to our impermanence instead. Sometimes we never feel so mortal as on the morning after.