My work over the past few years has looked at the boundary between private and public space and how this is constantly shifting. The boundary is being tested with the advent of new technologies, as the concepts of distance and identity are being permeated and challenged particularly by the Internet. I am interested in how society constantly redefines concepts of acceptability and permission in response to this. As ‘private space’ is more narrowly confined to the domestic environment and the realm of the family, my work invariably has an autobiographic element to it. 

My recent work comprises watercolour paintings of children in dreamlike settings. The mood and palette is reminiscent of nostalgic images of the early mid-twentieth century. Initially I was interested in how children in the early twenty-first century are losing their innocence so early and growing up so quickly. It seems that today’s children are in a continual state of transition or rites of passage, accelerated or indeed truncated. I started to experiment with children playing with flowers as a metaphor for their progress. My animation developed out of this concept.

As I completed these images of mostly nude children I became interested in the picture’s interrelationship with the viewer.  One cannot escape the issue that children with their youth, beauty and innocence prompt in many viewers a desire to stare at them, indeed a small percentage of the population may even project their erotic longings onto children.  

Laura Mulvey’s essay on ‘Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema describes this “political economy of looking.” There is no ‘just looking’. It is always active and motivated. It is inseparable from desire and desire is inseparable from power. There may be a ‘raw’ desire to look shared by us all but this is soon managed and shaped through culture”

The social political climate is becoming increasingly conservative to child imagery. Indeed governments across Europe are considering banning all nude imagery of children as a consequence of well-publicised abuse and digital manipulation of images to circumvent existing legislation. This new conservatism is paradoxically, the result of the extraordinary openness of the Internet and the exploitative industry that has erupted around child pornography. The barrier between private and public worlds is simultaneously opening and closing.

Paintings as opposed to photographs do not directly infringe a child’s privacy in quite the same way. Questions still remain as to whether in producing these images has the artist (in this case myself) betrayed the most sacred of trusts? Were the images achieved through coercion and an imbalance of power where the child is helpless? Is the viewer eventually complicit in this? These are the issues my work explores.