This series of paintings combine destructive mark making, traditional ornamental motifs along with reflection. The layered oppositional qualities of ornament and defacement used within the works can be seen as symbols of the historic roles that the Gypsy continues to perform in the popular imagination – the romantic and the demonised. Through choreographed dialogue, the contrasting tropes within the paintings wrestle in a failed endeavor to break free from the palimpsestic effacement of the looking glass.

When does a mark of defacement become ornamental and vice versa? These questions become more complex with the realisation that my works are made in a reverse order to which they appear. Unlike painting on canvas or wood, the nature of reverse glass painting requires that the mark closest to the viewer is the first mark made by the artist. This temporal reversal of events, which becomes clear to an enquiring eye after a short while, brings into imagining the choreographed incidents of mark making.