Soft Focus is a body of work that explores memory, emotion, and identity through imagined landscapes. These paintings translate fragments of personal history into expansive terrains. These are not depictions of specific locations, but psychological spaces shaped by recollection, feeling, and the slow movement of time.

I use imagined landscapes as a way to think through identity as something unstable and continually forming. Mountains and mist emerge, dissolve, and reappear within fields of green. Horizons blur, passages deepen into shadow, and forms shift between solidity and disappearance. The terrain becomes a metaphor for becoming — something shaped gradually through pressure, erosion, and accumulation.

Chosen materials are central to how these ideas take form. I stain oil paint directly into linen so the colour seeps into the linen, rather than sitting on the surface. Layers are then rubbed back, scratched into, and partially removed before new marks are added. This repeated building and eroding creates surfaces that hold traces of earlier decisions. The paintings develop slowly, with each gesture altering or revealing what sits beneath it.

Through this process, the surface begins to mirror the conceptual concerns of the work. Identity, memory, and experience are not presented as fixed images but as layered formations — marks that appear, disappear, and remain partially visible.

These paintings are quiet, imagined worlds — places where stillness can exist. They hold space for reflection, but also for pause and drift. The paintings expect little, yet they offer something increasingly rare: a place of calm, softness, and quiet attention.