Liberty’s Arc — Solo Exhibition, Arcadia Contemporary, New York, 2015

The works in my first solo exhibition in New York grew out of a particular cultural moment: the London 2012 Olympics, when the Union Jack and the iconography of British identity carried something invigorating — an openness, a warmth, a genuine pride in ordinary people and what they might achieve together. Watching those same emblems shift in meaning through the years that followed has given them a charged tension in my work that continues to fascinate me, even as it grows more complicated.

Woven throughout is a thread I have returned to since my earliest years as a painter: women in military dress. The impulse began in the great museums of the world, standing before vast canvases celebrating victories and campaigns across centuries of history — and noticing the absence of women, despite the fact that they were always there, fighting alongside and behind the lines in ways that were rarely recorded and almost never celebrated. Placing young women into that visual language remains a theme I am drawn to revisit time and again.

This collection also includes The White Hart — a painting that has grown in significance since its loss in a fire some years later. The mythological resonance of the white hart, that most elusive of creatures, seems only to have deepened in its absence.

Several works from this series are available as prints and continue to be enduring favourites.