As an experienced actress and a portrait photographer,

I am not afraid of the power of intimacy, empathy and projection. Paintings of naked people can be confronting, sensual, moving. They speak volumes but have no text. As someone who has committed hundreds of thousands of lines to memory over the last twenty years, I like that.

I may initiate my work via ‘the other’ but, with repetitive drawing from successive pieces, my paintings of the nude begin to evoke a sense of the universal as well as the personal. They are no longer clearly a portrait of another woman; their abstraction emanates my desires, my decisions, my responses: to materials, to time, to being female, and to the exquisite vulnerability of having skin. I was a teenager with talent who stopped making art until I turned 40, so every portrait of someone I care for is also a statement about myself:

This is who I am, this is what I like, this is what matters to me.