Paintings 2021.

I paint awkward, confused, and hesitant figures to explore our existence where seriousness and laughable co-exist.

I work mainly in paint, using oil, charcoal and oil pastel on paper. My artworks depict bodily creatures occupying dreamlike spaces. These fanciful scenes explore themes of identity, agency, self-determination and longing.

My work has a certain perversity, humour and fragility to it. The subjects of my paintings appear both comical and tragic — as if the sense of humour is critical to survival in this strange world I have created. Hesitant and restless, they waver between feelings of enthusiasm and despair. This awkward tension explores a sense of confusion, which affects our moral, social and political hopes.

Formally, I work with semi-familiar shapes, ludic colour and active lines, which help to shape these ambiguous and crooked narratives. My works sit somewhere between a painting and a drawing. There is differentiation in the velocity between fast-sketched charcoal or oil pastel shapes and the slower marks in oil paint. In my process, the act of erasing is as important as determining what to preserve. This crude materiality suggests references to urban aesthetics, where things happen fast, bodies pass in transit, assemble, become visible, and, through that, political.