“I think fantasy is conjecture not escapism, it’s a way of re-imagining the world. Paintings are virtual spaces and I think of them as being endlessly mutable places or frameworks. In my paintings I try to make something that, in the immediate moment of viewing it, has an overwhelming sense of rightness. They have an aesthetic logic indicative of a potential belief in order, if not an actual order. They’re all the time invoking chaos and dissolution, but I try to make them still and coherent as paintings. I don’t work from source imagery at all, I try to make stuff up and improvise as much as possible. I try to stop the superego intervening and not let my ‘critical other’ intervene. All the imagery formulates in a dream-like way: partial and confused narratives, the mishmash of everyday life, old memories, snippets of tunes, everything I’ve ever seen. This material doesn’t necessarily have meaning, it’s just what all the neurons in my brain are doing when they’re free-wheeling. In my paintings I try to shift, transpose, and super-organise this material into something architectural, something that has a weight about it that suggests meaning.”