This body of paintings began with a childhood memory of extracting my dad from Ladbrokes. Before I could understand gambling, work or survival, I knew them only abstractly: a pull, a threshold I couldn’t cross, a period of absence, something necessary that had to be done. These paintings continue my investigation into how inherited behaviours, habits and ways of being, here those shaped by risk, can take pictorial form. The forms and faces come from my unruly research and personal experience, with fragments taken from stock images and archival photographs. Brought into painting, they become subject to different rules, conditions and ways of looking. Through cropping, concealment, support and movement, I’m exploring how much a human fragment can undergo while still holding a presence, and whether the fragment organises the painting or the painting organises the fragment.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​