Statement

I am interested in images and ideas that eclipse the mental and physical. I make paintings and drawings in various media that take observations of real events and stories as well as fictitious icons, as catalysts for fantasy based allegories. More particularly I explore those that support false comfort and prefigure the complexity of choice and purpose within contemporary culture. I am drawn to narratives where history, denial and belief systems become interchangeable. I understand this through both the individual as well as the collective agenda. It is these patterns of choice, convenience and their failure that I am engaged with.

My working process evolves slowly through several projects that run concurrently. Much of my work has a bathetic humour that seeks to highlight the absurd and vulnerable contexts in which we carve out our preferences and dreams. For instance the recent project Altitude Sickness was conceived in response to Hitler's Alpine retreat at Berchtesgarden becoming a tourist restaurant following World War 11. I explored that double-edged convenience of memory and its erasure through a fantasy of appropriated fast-food celebration. The work often indulges in art history as a library of resource that bridges seemingly disparate contexts. In the series How not to disappear completely for example, I evacuated several hermit paintings from art history, of their (former) residents, in light of the news that the Leopard Man of Skye had surrendered his seclusion after twenty five years alone, by booking himself into an old people's home in Birmingham, England. This real-life anchor is critical to the realisation of the project. It becomes the connection and raison d'être that informs the fantasy in my response. Other recent projects have included creationist narrative and the humanising of fictitious icons.

'In Willems' work, the material and the ephemeral constantly compete. In many works, there is a deftly negotiated presentation of what we understand to be represented. We are never completely sure if he is talking about the materialisation of the image -literally the manifestation of paint on canvas- or of the material of which its content is made. Figures, human bodies and entire landscapes often seem to be continually in the process of materialising and then dissolving. People negotiate fragmenting landscapes. Non-existent species and droids from other worlds experience the pains of human flesh in emotive vignettes. Aeroplanes unfurl their advertising banners over landscapes that appear to be fragmenting beneath them.'