Dad’s Drawer 2026

When I was ten years old, I found my father’s Playboy collection hidden in a drawer in his room. When I asked him what it was, he said, “This is art, son.”

Around the same time, he told me he was leaving to live in Singapore. He said he would be back in two years. He said he would bring back a Ferrari. He never came back.

We lived in poverty. I went to a violent inner London comprehensive. A stepfather came into my life and brought violence and abuse with him. My mother turned a blind eye.

My father, meanwhile, lived a life filled with women, fast cars, boats and parties. He married twice more in Asia and wanted me to accept these women as family. Years later, when I challenged him about how he could have left us, he said, “What about my life?”

For eight years I struggled with my health and depression. Therapy gave me a way through it, and eventually a way to let the trauma out. That process became this work.

Dad’s Drawer uses the contents of that drawer as its starting point. Vintage magazine imagery is embedded in heavily worked painted grounds, partially buried through layering, abrasion and erasure. Handwritten fragments, phrases are painted into the surface. A recurring drawer motif runs through each piece.

It is a series about childhood, abandonment, memory and the stories we carry into adulthood. And, ultimately, what we choose to do with them.