A long way from Croydon

A 2020 Milestone: Miami Abstraction

On 6 October 2020, I finished this six‑foot canvas while living in Miami. It marked a pivotal moment in my practice: I was exploring performance art, looking at non‑gender‑conforming performers, drag artists and club kids, and asking how their fluid identities could translate into paint.

This painting is pure energy on a grand scale. I started with an intuitive process—scrawling lines, turning the canvas, finding shapes and wiping them away—and kept pushing until I found a balance between chaos and cohesion. You can see traces of figures and props: a loose suggestion of a stage, maybe a head tilted back in song, maybe a costumed arm mid‑gesture. It’s deliberately ambiguous, inviting viewers to map their own associations onto the work.

Colour and mood

Miami’s heat and nightlife seeped into the palette. A soft, almost dreamy pale blue provides a backdrop, while pastel yellows, peaches and pinks swirl together like stage lights refracted through smoke. Streaks of lemon yellow and cerulean blue hint at bodies or costumes in motion. Across the top and bottom, I scribbled bright fluorescent pink letters—half legible, half abstract—to echo the performative graffiti and neon signage that influenced me at the time. The overall effect is both warm and restless, capturing the thrill and vulnerability of performance.

Looking back, this piece embodies the themes I’ve carried forward: transformation, improvisation, and the blurred lines between seeing and imagining. It was the first time I successfully channelled the energy of performers onto such a large scale, and it lit a fuse for the work that followed. When I view it now, I’m still struck by how much physical and emotional effort went into it—the marks, colours and layers all evidence of that moment in Miami when everything felt possible. Of course many thanks go to Opal and Gaby for their time and representation in this piece.