• “Refraction painting” is a term I use to describe a body of colour-based works that employ semi-transparent acrylic surfaces to scatter light waves, creating real-time refraction events. In these works, colour and form act as vehicles to reveal the behaviour of light within the frame, drawing attention to the optical qualities of the material itself.

    This line of inquiry emerged from an earlier photographic portrait series in which I experimented with Polaroids and other film formats shot through bespoke lenses. Using sheets of glass and acrylic treated with pigments, wax, and surface interventions, I sought to make photographic portraits feel closer to painting. While the initial results were compelling, the process of translating these images into painted works framed behind frosted acrylic revealed that my true subject was not the figure, but light itself—the mechanics of perception, and the subtleties of vision. The presence of a face within the frame became a distraction from this inquiry. In one body of work, I stripped away portraiture—a previously central element of my practice—and entered a new phase of experimentation, one concerned with sensory perception and the study of light as material.

    My broader interest has long been in questioning and subverting the formal traditions of painting. These works, though read as paintings due to their rectangular format and their position on the wall, operate in many ways as sculptures. Their logic is rooted in material and spatial concerns, rather than the surface-based conventions of painterly gesture. The introduction of the frosted acrylic screen effectively transformed the work into a lens, blurring and distorting what lies beneath, and in doing so, foregrounded perception itself as the subject. Instead of producing static abstract representations of natural phenomena, I developed material means of enacting these time-based events directly—works that draw attention to the durational aspects of looking, and to the instability of light as it shifts across surfaces.

    This process also unsettled my own attachment to the identity of being a painter. Is it still a painting if we cannot see the paint? While colour and luminosity remain perceptible, the tactile qualities most often associated with painting—texture, mark, surface—are absent. The elimination of one element allows another to become amplified: colour emerges as a central presence, though for me it has always been secondary, a structural support for the light refraction produced through this specific framing method.

    The conceptual lineage of this work connects to artists who have similarly destabilised the categories of painting and photography. Uta Barth’s painterly photographs, with their soft focus and dissolution of form into diffused blocks of colour, blur the boundary between medium and perception. Equally formative were Anish Kapoor’s Void Field works (1989), immersive installations that profoundly altered my own perceptual awareness. Kapoor’s fields evoke the infinite by suspending depth perception, an effect that resonates with my own exploration of light as both material and perceptual event.

 
 
 

  • Voices from the Void is an interactive sound installation made from a series of custom brass drums that remain silent until someone enters their space.

    Each drum is tuned to a note within a carefully chosen scale, designed so that a broad range of combinations can sit together harmonically while still allowing more dissonant relationships to emerge. As people move through the installation, proximity sensors activate tones that vibrate the drum skins, bringing different intervals and clusters in and out of the room. The sound is projected through the drums themselves, so the physical resonance of each object becomes part of its voice.

    The black drum skins sit almost like voids against the wall, while the brass catches and reflects the surrounding light, creating a soft halo around each form. I wanted the objects to have a strong presence even when silent, and for the transition into sound to feel slightly unexpected, as though the space itself is gradually becoming responsive.

    Harmony is built into the foundational structure of the work, but the composition remains open. A single person moving slowly through the installation can produce something sparse and meditative, while a group can discover different relationships between the drums, building chords, creating tension, or playing with silence and timing. The work changes according to how people choose to move, listen and respond to one another.

    I am particularly interested in this social aspect of the installation. Once people realise that they are collectively shaping the sound, the behaviour of the room begins to change. Sometimes people move carefully between the drums, listening closely to the relationships they create. At other times it becomes playful and unpredictable, with groups experimenting together and discovering combinations that were never explicitly composed into the work.

    When nobody is present, the drums return to silence. As people enter and begin moving through the installation, the gallery is transformed into a large-scale immersive instrument. The audience becomes both composer and performer, shaping the work through movement, timing, proximity and interaction. Rather than listening to a fixed composition, people are invited to play the room itself, discovering shifting harmonies, moments of dissonance and silence as they move through the space.

  • PARTICLE DRUM

    The Particle Drum is a kinetic sound sculpture that invites human interaction as its mode of activation. Suspended slightly from the gallery wall, its white circular form contains a cluster of black glass beads and white tines visible through a clear Perspex face. Once set in motion, these elements collide and resonate, producing a polyphonic field of texture and tone.

    The resulting soundscape is bubbling and fragmented, echoing the noisy fields of colour that inhabit the surrounding space. As the drum’s energy dissipates, the sound gradually disassembles into distinct percussive notes, an abstract score shaped by gravity and chance.

    A suspended microphone captures the sculpture in real time, redirecting its sound through a granular effects pedal. This processed signal is played back into the far corner of the gallery as a pitched-down, reverberant reflection of the original, refracting the physical sound into a spectral counterpart.

    This slow unravelling becomes a kind of meditative ritual, drawing attention to small shifts in rhythm, texture and decay. The Particle Drum explores the interplay of movement, material and perception, transforming a simple physical action into a study of rhythm, decay and resonance.

    PARTICLE PLATE

    The Particle Plate is an instrument built around play, chance and materiality. It grew out of my interest in granular synthesis and the unpredictable rhythms and textures that emerge when sound is broken into fragments. The initial idea came from seeing sand poured across guitar strings, producing textures remarkably similar to those created through digital granular processes. This led me to explore pouring and scattering as physical methods for generating electronic sound.

    Rice, beans and other small objects are dropped onto the plate, allowing gravity and chance to shape the resulting rhythms while pitch remains constrained to a chosen scale. The gesture of scattering material across the surface remains directly connected to what is heard, making an otherwise abstract electronic process physical, visible and intuitive.

    The work continues my broader interest in natural systems, and in forces such as gravity, time and chance as active collaborators in the creative process.

  • Deep Field designates a series of works in which three-dimensional structures are positioned behind an acrylic screen. By extending beyond the flat pictorial plane, these works bring sculptural depth into play as a condition of perception. The acrylic surface functions as a lens, mediating between viewer and form, and creating visual effects that recall the mechanics of photography.

    The optical qualities of each work depend upon proximity. Materials near the acrylic screen appear sharp and saturated, while those further back blur into softness, producing a gradient of focus akin to photographic depth of field. Early studies used hand-modelled sheets of painted aluminium, while later iterations employed dichroic film and reflective materials to intensify luminosity and chromatic complexity. As light ricochets between surface and form, ghost images emerge, colours shift, and the works appear to glow as if animated from within.

    This glow produces a subtle dissonance: although the works are resolutely material, their blurred depths and spectral reflections evoke the language of digital screens. This tension positions Deep Field within a lineage of practices that interrogate perception itself—from the perceptual instability of Op Art to the phenomenological experiments of the Light and Space movement. At the same time, the series speaks to the conditions of the digital age, where the saturation of screen-based imagery has reshaped our habits of seeing.

    My intention is not to replicate photography or digital motifs, but to engage critically with them as unavoidable frameworks of vision today. Deep Field positions itself as an interface between perception, materiality, and light—an unstable terrain where recognition falters, and new ways of seeing may emerge.

  • This body of work investigates the generation of what I term phantom colours—hues that arise not from pigment itself but from optical phenomena. When light refracts through a frosted acrylic screen, the eye perceives colours that are not materially present on the painted surface. In this way, the works create chromatic events that occupy an in-between zone, perceptible yet immaterial.

    Bands of pigment, placed at carefully measured intervals, serve as the foundation of this effect. Two adjacent hues, such as red and blue, can produce the perception of a purple that exists only in the viewer’s vision. The size and intensity of these phantom zones vary depending on both the spacing of the bands and the distance of the acrylic screen from the painted ground.

    In developing this series, I was mindful of precedents such as Carlos Cruz-Diez, whose work in the mid-twentieth century transformed colour into an active, temporal experience. His installations and paintings invite the viewer to move, shifting the perceptual event through their changing position in space. My own approach shares this interest in colour as dynamic and relational, but diverges in the use of a frosted acrylic screen. The screen introduces a sculptural and refractive element, generating phantom colours through light itself rather than solely through the juxtaposition of painted pigment. In this way, the work extends the perceptual dialogue into a more interactive and three-dimensional register.

    When the colour bands are evenly spaced, the works generate dazzling, almost dizzying, optical effects. However, without variation, the significance of phantom colours is less apparent. By adjusting the scale of the bands, I establish points of comparison: large colour fields emphasise distinction, while smaller, compressed bands intensify the perceptual blending that generates new hues.

    Ultimately, Chromatic Synthesis functions as both an experiment and a learning tool. It explores how simple chromatic structures can produce a far wider perceptual spectrum, and in doing so, it suggests parallels with sound. Just as overlapping frequencies generate harmonic relationships, colour intervals produce perceptual hues that transcend their material base. My hope is that these works invite viewers to consider colour not as a static property, but as a dynamic, relational event—something that, like music, exists most fully in the moment of perception.

 
 

  • This series unfolds the idea that sound may be translated into abstract visual systems, drawing upon the long tradition of graphic notation. The term eye music itself refers to a form of visual composition that dates back to the fifteenth century. One of the earliest known examples is Belle, bonne, sage by Renaissance composer Baude Cordier, written in the shape of a heart so that its form enriched the meaning of the music. Such experiments established a precedent for visualizing sound through symbolic or abstract means.

    My works build on this lineage while also reflecting on the experimental traditions of indeterminacy pioneered by John Cage. By adapting forms drawn from conventional musical notation—grids, circles, and linear structures—I have developed a system of drawing that is at once playful and ordered. The process echoes the improvisatory nature of music while retaining an underlying sense of calm structure.

    In these works, circles within circles are arranged across horizontal registers, suggesting the linear flow of musical time. Each circle functions as a harmonic unit, a cluster of frequencies interacting in relation to the others, so that the entire composition reads simultaneously as a pattern and as a field of organic relations.

    The frosted acrylic screen, also central to my Chromatic Synthesis series, plays a crucial role here. It diffuses the edges of each hand-drawn circle, producing phantom hues in the intervals where colour rings overlap. These spectral tones behave like chords or clusters in music—sometimes resonant, sometimes dissonant—as adjacent frequencies collide and interact. In this way, Eye Music extends the chromatic investigations of Chromatic Synthesis into a visual language that parallels the harmonic and polyphonic structures of sound.