Moonrakers (2024) is the first painting in a series of three and gestated during the global pandemic. This large painting - made with ink, oil, charcoal and pastel in monochrome - initially rendered a sense of impotence at ‘looking on’ as the impacts of the pandemic unfolded, suspended in time, but obscured from full view (in isolation). The depiction of temporary structures and interim sites of occupation, the curtains or veils imply impermanence and allude to the veiling of the events and actions that transpire during human tragedies.
The title comes from the tale of 16thC ‘moonrakers’, smugglers retrieving hidden contraband from a pond in Wiltshire (where this painting was made) by moonlight, who when caught duplicitously pretend to be trying to rake in a cheese - the reflection of the moon. Taken for buffoons, there was no further investigation, and their illicit activities continued. Here, a reflection of the moon implies a skull, a visual doubling and memento mori that also ripples throughout this image and the subsequent large drawing-paintings in the series. As ‘bystanders’ to the precarity of human experiences, these moonlit scenes express the sense, and act, of being witness to a disruption and displacement, fact and fiction, memory and forgetting.