The journey paintings document road trips made from one location to another. Road Diversions Series 2004 comprises 30 paintings that hang in a seamless horizontal line (about a foot apart from one another) along the gallery wall. They can be viewed as a narrative sequence rather like film stills or a video loop. The journey follows a route from a provincial town to central London; passing through landscapes, cityscapes and motorway tunnels.

I use digital photography and video to collect source material to generate the work. I travel by bus, using a digital camera to take pictures through the front and back windscreens of the vehicle. I record perhaps 200 photographs and select from these to paint a specific journey with a specific destination. The images are often framed by the bus windscreen and rear view mirror. I work directly from the photograph using oil paint on board.

I am influenced by road trips I have made in the USA, Europe and more recently my home in East Anglia. The paintings also reference the narrative sequence of road movies and the literature of writers such as Jack Kerouac and Iain Sinclair's London Orbital.

The paintings explore the generic road trip with associations of speed, escape, freedom, alienation: I try to weave a narrative sequence into the journeys I document. The narrative may be sparked by logos on passing lorries, or slogans on motorway tunnel walls. A series of tunnel images taken on the Northern Circular as the bus enters London develop into an internal journey and the notion of a light at the end of the tunnel. The paintings become psychological spaces.

It is also important that the paintings are mediated images framed by the vehicle windscreen, via a digital medium, and finally made within the frame of a painting. The images make the familiar and speedy experience of driving appear slower and more unfamiliar. The painterly marks slow down the reading of the image; whilst the florescent paint echoes the road markings and signage along the route. For me this mediated image somehow represents a phenomenon of modern life: we travel in capsules and experience landscape from within these containers as well as via digital media; for example we travel in cars, and we perceive landscape via TV, advertising, film, images on mobile phones etc. I present a romantic notion that the pace of electronic living can be slowed down when it is rendered in the form of a painting.

My current work is supported by Escalator Visual Arts East Talent Plan during 2004-2006. My current research focuses on the random nature of journeys made by public transport; we usually know our destination but we rarely know who our fellow travellers may be. To engage with this randomised element I am exploring a way of working whereby I find the bus stop closest to the exhibition/venue with the aim of taking the first bus that passes; I then document that bus route during the course of one day.