Peopled by mysterious figures and faces, my paintings are an exploration of how we relate both to and between the self and the other. This relationality is suffused with anxiety and ambivalence in works that play with affect and sincerity. Personal preoccupations with contemporary social and environmental crises combine with my interest in religion, art history, and mythology, and are informed by my lived experiences with mental illness, trauma, queerness, and femininity. These thematics entwine to form a cord binding my work together.
Tensions and fluctuations between the irrational and rational, tender and violent, powerful and powerless are engaged with through figuration where the unsettled subject, in turn, unsettles the viewer. Colour and brushstrokes in my work do not serve to capture likeness but rather to convey particular internal subjective experiences. The initial compositions for my paintings are constructed through collaging personal, invented, and found imagery to create an evocative reference that I can consult at various points during the painting process.
Barriers between landscape and body are sometimes fragmented, each invading the space of the other. One feature may be rendered representationally while another may become totally abstracted. The logic of the painting rests on a mercurial dreamlike and, sometimes, nightmarish foundation of internal conflicts and doubts played out across the canvas.