My paintings explore nuanced themes of multiplicities, psychosexuality, and the human condition. My work is influenced by Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology. This book is a crucial guide to understanding how our actions and orientations towards objects and spaces are shaped by and reflect social norms and identities, especially for those with non-normative or queer orientations.

The figures in my work disrupt conventional boundaries of the body through repetition, distortion, and scale. This visual representation of abjection reflects queer experiences of disorientation, confronting conventional expectations about the body.

My work from 2022-24 focused on larger-than-life portraits of myself, and my close friends and local community members who identify as 2SLGBTQIA+ to explore psychosexuality, gender, vulnerability, melancholy and identity. The scale of this work is critical as it is important for queer people to occupy physical space in an institutional setting. The individuals featured in this work confront the viewer with direct eye-contact as a form of acknowledgement, their presence is established. This is in direct defiance of the male gaze to empower women and gender minorities. These paintings subvert the male gaze and pose the question of who is visible and who has the power to look.

More recently, I have been focused on the figure in interior spaces, questioning how objects and interiors can inform and reflect one’s identity. I am interested in capturing movement and moments of intimacy in private settings. Drawing from visual reference in the canon of art history, these works are recontextualized to reflect the reality and conflicts of existence in our modern times.

I render enigmatic dualities: the dichotomy that exists between bliss and anguish or desire and disgust. Lustrous movement frozen in time perpetuates a sense of the uncanny. Multiples of the same individual in different conditions of being signifies an uncanny double, or doppelgänger. Something commonplace seen in a way that is suddenly strange: a face forming from another. Like the self, but threateningly other…What is familiar is rendered unfamiliar.

Painting is the perfect medium to articulate this work as it creates a window into intimate spaces and unseen moments of intimacy. There is a slippage that transpires in painting. A place that exists between reality and abstraction. Between the mirror and the gaze. It is visible yet physically indefinable, intangible. This work conveys a pensive existence—a realm of the unconscious—and unveils the disorienting spectacle of the psychological mirror world.