My work draws upon the balance of being an artist mother, for many years exclusively working from home, making paintings that are both intimately familiar and claustraphobically uncanny, set in domestic or decorated interiors. The imagery in "Tulips" is inspired by vintage craft manuals on homemaking, fashion magazines and old Hollywood dressing room photos. The use of specific colours and patterns is important, derived from these references and nod towards perceived notions of femininity, nostalgia and taste. I use white acrylic paint as a primer in certain compositional parts only, laying down patterns and certain details, and then work with acrylic inks, letting them seep and saturate into those unprimed parts of the wooden surface. The affect is quite loose in areas, giving the somewhat vintage inspired work a more contemporary reading, but this layering of inky paint also suggests watercolor painting and the tropes of femininity and domesticity that this medium historically dictates. My work has always been concerned with imagery that is slightly off kilter, exaggerated or fabricated, deliberately saturated or starkly lit, producing contrived and manufactured environments which are oddly dreamlike and static, which is the case with "Tulips".The use of the reflection in the mirror, the doubling or twinning of the figure further heightens this feeling of the uncanny and a somewhat voyeuristic presence. I regard my works as being a still from a story or film, caught up in a moment, the image paused; sometimes melodramatic, sometimes fragments of quiet and uneasy tension.