Our work speaks for itself.

For Eccles, abstraction is not escape from reality, but a way of staying with it.

Practice Statement — Learning to Hold

None of us chose to arrive here, yet each of us eventually discovers that life places weight upon us. Some burdens are visible, others silent; some inherited, others arriving without warning. Much of life becomes the gradual process of learning how to carry what cannot simply be put down.

Eccles’ paintings are built from this idea.

Through layered surfaces and large physical spaces, the works attempt to embody endurance itself — not triumph, but persistence. The paintings are repeatedly reworked over long periods of time until they arrive at a state that feels lived-in rather than manufactured. Marks remain partially buried beneath newer decisions, allowing earlier states of the painting to continue existing inside the final surface.

This process mirrors emotional experience: nothing is fully erased, only absorbed.

Within the tension between collapse and cohesion, darkness and light, the paintings search for moments of stillness — places where complexity can be held rather than solved. The work does not aim to provide answers. Instead, it asks whether there may be strength in remaining present inside uncertainty long enough for resilience to quietly form around it.

Over time, what once felt unbearable can become something we learn to carry differently.

That transformation — slow, imperfect, human — sits at the centre of Eccles’ practice