THE GRUG is a symbolic system told through paintings painted digitally by hand in an allegorical style, forming a larger graphic IP project. Every image is a working part of a larger symbolic structure, with recurring characters, motifs and opposing forces developing across the sequence.

At its centre are perennial tensions between the material and the abstract, nature and civilization, primitive and civilized, vitality and sterility, chaos and order, the individual and the collective, body and spirit, night and day, instinct and intellect, utopia and dystopia, while leaving room for the viewer to notice and interpret other dualities and symbols for themselves.

The work also reflects something of the contemporary zeitgeist, using a primordial imagined world to explore some of the conditions and tensions of the present, while touching on forces that can feel almost eternal.

The paintings are designed to stand on their own, while also being experienced as part of a larger whole. Symbols introduced early return later, shift in meaning and form relationships with what came before. As the sequence unfolds, the paintings and the story gradually cohere into a larger narrative.

Beneath this is also a more self-reflective thread, touching on the inner conflicts, contradictions and processes of growth that exist within the individual, carried through the form of a heroic narrative that has become less prominent in contemporary culture, and in doing so, acts as a form of defiance towards it.