Currently, you are having your 2nd show here in London at Rhodes gallery, A woman by another name, how is it?

It’s going really well, it’s really nice for this to be my second show with my gallery too. It seems to be really well received, as I am not there every day, however, I’ve been getting tagged on Instagram, so it’s been so cool to see so many people coming through and enjoying the work. I feel really lucky that there is such a positive response to it. 

It’s a collection of 32 images, was it always going to be such a big collection? 

Hahaha no, it’s just I ended up having so much time to make it. You know last year, we’d been talking about my next show and I ended up starting the series around December and it was going to be June/July that we did the show. So in terms of making the work, I ended up with a lot of time to think about it, mull over it really and once I started making it, I didn’t stop. 

When I paint, my process is usually to shoot a portrait, then print out several images from that shoot, so I end up with multiple images from that one person. So it ended up being like, a few final pieces but working out what would fit in the gallery and mulling the selection down to a nice curation. So yes the entire body of work is 32 prints, yet in the exhibition, we are showing 27 of them.

Why were you excited about this collaboration with us, INKD & Ciroc?  

Well firstly Ciroc is a globally recognised brand and when you’re out on the town, I feel like it’s definitely a bottle you not only see but recognise instantly. It feels like a staple of popular culture and having such a fascination in that and being able to question and look at this area, within my work and collaborate with a brand that is within the culture, is super special for me.  l also love to keep photos, magazine clippings, clothing tags that have a cool design. So what makes this collaboration a really lovely project,  is that we are giving the bottle a second life, as a vessel, sculpture or even a piece of art that you can feel proud to display in your home! It’s also good for the environment.

What was your initial thought process when it came to the designs? 

I actually really love design, before I was an artist or even at art school I studied design and feel that the basis of my practice is heavily embedded in design and the way it structures our world. If you think about design, everything is a set of rules, based on a layout and if everything is a layout, that is invisible, yet makes all the difference. I find it so fascinating, how design plays a role in advertising and selling us things. 

So it came about the same time I was making my most recent body of work and I was already looking at symbols and food. 

My design is a little different to my normal work, as it has a collage element and uses mixed multimedia. As much as I like painting over things, I also like pulling things apart and re-constructing them, is also a really fascinating way to look at images, the way that we can kind of use creativity in the terms of photography art or even fashion, to embrace who we are, more or even disguise parts of ourselves, looking into the idea of being self-conscious or societal pressures, I think that collage is a really fun way to do that. So I took some of those elements and pulled them apart, through cut and paste.

You’ve brought in your mediums of both paint & collage, have you always implemented this into your work & how did this way of creating come about?

I think it’s always kind of been there, I don’t know exactly how to tie the two together completely yet. However, I feel what I have done for this bottle design is more of an illustrator style than that of the fine art stuff. Back at university in my final year, the best advice I ever got from a teacher was ‘Draw from your every day..’ and question why those things are there and how you could make them all talk. So the one thing that I noticed was that I collect, well basically hoard fashion magazines, like Vogue because I adore the imagery. Another thing I realised was that I also love life drawing, painting women from life, which is the opposite of what you see in magazines. So how my technique started, was painting over the imagery in the magazines. It has since evolved from there into something more concise.