Current works

These pantings are representative of how my work is currently expanding, with the more recent pieces at the top navigating down to some earlier ones from 2023.

Painterly, expressive, and emotionally charged, this new body of work is discerning the thresholds between chaos and order, light and shadow, instinct and reflection. Created through an intuitive layering process, the large-scale paintings of this new series offer a space of becoming – where nothing is fully resolved, and everything is still in motion.

These works are born from a deep, internal shift. A letting-go of safety, of polish, of the impulse to resolve. I’m exploring what happens when I surrender to process, when I trust instinct over intellect, gesture over image, uncertainty over clarity. There is tension in these paintings – between light and shadow, between intention and disruption, between trust and suspicion. I let the materials lead, allowing accidents, contradiction, and failure into the process. What emerges is a kind of emotional cartography – not of specific places or stories, but of the internal weather systems we all move through.

This work is not about answers, symbols, or solutions. It’s about presence. About being in a space of not knowing and staying there long enough to find something true. To sit with ambiguity, lean into tension, and maybe, in doing so, to recognise something of our own quiet contradictions. For me, painting is a place where complexity doesn’t need to be solved. It needs to be held.

The quality of creativity is something I love considering. A link between the subconscious and our perceived reality. A felt Connection that can be treated as matter, moulded into tangents, and sometimes revealed. Creativity in all its arrangements is the sensory abstract attempting to be articulated in a form that transcends everyday language. Thoughts can’t be fully realised until we’ve attempted to share them. The imaginative chaos settling into comprehensible parts while remaining strange. A magical realism trying to speak to Subjectivity. You know that feeling when you wake up from an intense dream that felt full of bizarre and seemingly unrelated features? That’s your intuition making sense of your experience and turning it into an independent film that, as it existed, no one will ever see.

My practice is an attempt to reveal what’s floating around in there, engaging in narratives between reality and imagination. Beginning paintings in abstraction and allowing the work to develop its own form, I bring subconscious and conscious elements together into realised themes of dream-like obscurity, strength, and identity.

Contact Stef Rae to arrange a viewing of available current works.