This memory prompted me to revisit the houses, rooms and places where I had grown up, beginning with our family home at Tornaveen in Aberdeenshire. Using drawings, floor plans, architectural cutaways and a fair amount of invention, I began reconstructing these places in paint, gradually broadening the project to include some of the 29 homes I had lived in by then. Much of the work was made during the Covid lockdowns, when our relationship with home had suddenly become rather more complicated. The paintings became a way of exploring childhood, family, coming of age, loss and the peculiar business of remembering places that no longer exist quite as we imagine them.

The project culminated in my solo exhibition Dwell at the Open Eye Gallery in Edinburgh in April 2021. It remains one of the most personal bodies of work I have made, and perhaps a belated conversation with that nine-year-old boy, still waiting patiently in the school toilets in 1975.