I Contain Multitudes (2019, watercolour on paper)

This striking watercolour sees the artist engaging with contemporary ‘splatter’ painters such as Matthew Munsey, as well as a bold monochromatic tone in deepest Prussian blue. The dramatic effect created by folding the two ‘splattered’ halves of the work together, mirroring the painted areas over one another, creates a dramatic effect reminiscent of insect shapes, Rorschach ink blots or the renditions emerging from modern astronomy of galaxy filaments.

The title theme plays with scale, whether vast, minuscule or abstract: it gestures at the unimaginable multiplicity of the insect world that lives around, under, above and even inside us at all times, as well as to the equally unimaginable scale of a galaxy filament countless billions of light-years across, in which our entire planet is but a single atom. And finally, to the ever-shifting multiplicity underlying each human individual’s efforts to ‘fix’ a sense of themselves as a unitary being.