The painting is oil, and was inspired by a piece of wallpaper I have carried around with me for nigh on 11 years. I found the wallpaper in a derelict house in Liverpool one night when I went for a meal at a friends house, after the meal we were guided to the house next door, which on first approach sounded as if there was a waterfall in it. It turned out that it had been ransacked for all the copper piping and stuff and the water was still on, so throughout the 3 floors was a constant flow of water dripping through each soaking bedroom ceiling. As the torch lit up each room it became apparent that the property had not been long deserted and it was as if the person who had left had just walked out with a rucksack leaving each room in tact. But in its sodden state, and at the late hour we where visiting, the torch light made the whole place seem very sinister, especially with the overwhelming backdrop of loud flowing water. But we were yet to see the most unusual part of the house. As we climbed the final few stairs to the attic flat the torch caught the shapes of shoes scattered around the floor, at first sight this seemed relatively normal, but as we investigated every room it became apparent that there must have been about 1500 pairs of shoes carpeting the floors of each room, thrown around as if in some mad panic to find the matching pair before leaving.....for good!. At first I was ecstatic because I was working with shoes at the time, shoe sculpture, and I'd managed to collect about 500 shoes of the street over a year left by, well who knows who?! As I let the environment saturate my consciousness I started to inhabit the persona of the woman that had lived in this strange place, surrounded by, what was obviously, a fetish for footwear, but more than that, these shoes were from every era starting from the sixties.This environment revealed a sinister paranoiac character who's only anchor to the 'real' world was the shoe.  It was here that I ripped a piece of the wallpaper from the wall as an emotional snapshot of the whole experience. We left shortly after that, but I don't think I have ever really left that place, full of the ghosts of another someone.
So the painting is an expression of those feelings. The laborious and time consuming process of painting wallpaper with a pallet knife, each stroke a marker in time of my existence, full of the thoughts and feelings I had during painting it over the weeks, each mistake a reminder of my fallibility, another mirror in which to look .  Each panel discloses a sense of nothingness, wasted time and energy, perhaps echoing the sadness and repetition of existence as we are all surrounded by pattern and object, visual safety nets, homely and reliable patterns, patterns of time and reassuring continuity. Safe.