“The group series explores ideas of role play, identity and why people choose to commemorate a collective moment. It is a moment that is ’real’ but also performed and I find that tension interesting to examine. For Sandinistas I was exploring images of extreme environments, and people who operate outside ’civilisation’. Military paintings are traditionally associated with commemoration of victories and the celebration of the State. Painting guerrilla fighters in this way undermines this tradition; they represent something that has (or has been) ’lost’. The figures are painted in a very realistic way so that they are pushed out into our space in direct confrontation, while the background is flat and theatrical, redolent of an anthropological display. The painting is about our understanding and consumption of this type of picture. It presents a fiction that has become an archetypal or generic image that has little to do with the reality of the fighters’ existence.”