Through intimate, surrealist paintings I explore the juxtaposition of present and past, growth and decay, dream and reality in collage-like compositions. Faced with exaggerated changes in myself, my community and my family in recent years I am left with a desire to escape. My storybook images are ‘memories’ of things that never existed, they are the memories of childhood hopes that such things could exist. My paintings are rich with allegory, symbolism and hyper realistic detail.