Copper Skin explores oxidation as a metaphor, not as a chemical process. Nothing in these works is left to the weather: the greens the eye reads as patina are painted, built over months in cloth, texture and pigment until the surface persuades. When copper enters a piece it is usually sealed clean, its brightness intact — and when a found piece already carries its natural patina, I seal that too, so the process stops.

What draws me to that green is what it stands for. As copper oxidises it grows a new epidermis, and for me this transformation carries a deeply poetic resonance — the revival of a phoenix. Rather than symbolising deterioration or decay, oxidation becomes a source of beauty and renewal: a skin that carries time, damage and repair, and speaks of a moment in life when there is beauty in change and growth.

So I paint the passage of time onto surfaces that have not yet lived it. What interests me is the moment of belief — is it not a copper canvas if it is painted with copper paint? The alchemy happens in the viewer’s mind.