ARTIST STATEMENT The Abstract Carved Wood series is a further progression from my earlier series in carved wood. Carving external boundaries into increasingly abstract sculptured shapes has freed my imagination and allowed me to creatively develop new forms of expression. When I made the works in this series, my thoughts were on the concept of concealment. Firstly, nobody can know all that is inside another person. I see that human beings hide or partially mask their thoughts, feelings and motivations, even in many cases from themself. I wanted to point towards what is hidden and question why this happens. I observe that human relationships are not open and there are many hidden agendas in personal, social and political life. I came to understand this psychology by watching the decisions, behaviours and actions of individual people around me and of the political actions of nation states. Secondly, when I look to nature, all my life I could see expressive faces hidden in the trees, rocks, stones, pebbles, waterfalls, rivers and clouds My idea is that faces hidden in nature are a metaphor for the way humans hide their thoughts, feelings and motivations. In 2013 I visited Australia and was very struck by the different types of faces I saw in the rocks. I took thousands of Art photographs of these abstract shapes. This visual experience inspired many of the motifs in the abstract carved wood paintings.  I join these two observations to show that many things in human society are obscured. I achieve this by concealing many abstract faces inside the colours and textures of my works in the same way that I see these faces hidden in nature. Many people do not see these hidden portraits in my paintings in the same way that they don't see them in nature. I want to show that most people only notice superficial aspects of external reality. I want to question why so many people do not perceive what is happening below the surface. Most people don't recognise that much goes on in a secret dialogue, behind closed doors or beneath the veil. In my artworks I explore the reasons for hiding from deeper reality. I question why people are content to sleepwalk through life, blind to what is happening around them. I want my paintings to help people wake up from the effects of social conditioning and brainwashing so that they can see what's really going on in the world.