ASH #2 (2026) ‘Shaped in the Forge’

I’ve started using metallic acrylics, gilding waxes and gold foils in my work for this edition. I’m experimenting with ways of bringing a sense of glow and heat into the paintings, while developing abstract elements and visual components that I can evolve and carry through all eight pieces.

'Shaped in the Forge' explores what might be left behind. The intense heat of uncontrolled fire can reduce almost everything to its most basic elements, leaving little more than carbon, ash and the raw material from which nature can begin again.

As with the rest of the ASH edition, the subject is really the starting point rather than the message. I’m interested in what fire gives me as an artist: heat, light, texture, destruction, transformation and the possibility of renewal. The narrative sits somewhere beneath the surface, but the paintings themselves are where the story is told.

I wanted it to feel less like a painting of fire and more like a painting after the fire.

Because fire leaves more than ash behind.