Giclee print edition of 10 on archival Hahnemühle Photo Rag paper

85 x 110 cm

As I child I never went to Disneyland and I really, really wanted to go. (Deprived child, I know.) In 2015 I started a series of paintings which manifested an idea of Disneyland that would speak to me now. The models throughout the series were real life couples I'd met briefly in real life who'd become Facebook friends. I followed their seemingly charmed and happy lives as though they were my own personal celebrities and invited them to sit for me.

I cast them as well-known Disney couples, dressed them in vintage Disney paraphernalia and created dramatic and emotionally charged trysts and tableaux. The title for the series transmuted from ‘I never went to Disneyland’ to ‘Disneyland Dagenham’ after the model for Donald Duck in this painting, one of the first-ever male supermodels, Paul Sculfor, told me that a site near his hometown in Dagenham was on the shortlist for sites when they were deciding where to construct EuroDisney.

I imagined that they had built a Disneyland there, populated by tragic lovelorn hipsters, trying to make their grand loves work in the modern world whilst on a day trip to a theme park, where opera is blared over loudspeakers and the rides make you cry by engendering a surfeit of empathy with their grand and tragic themes. Like I said, a version of Disneyland I'd like to visit now. Yes, I know I'm a bit odd.