My paintings emerge from a search for visual and material forms that can give shape to preverbal experiences and psychic states that exist within myself and between myself and others, but cannot be directly seen.

My background includes performance, body modification and ritual-based work, which continue to shape my approach to painting. Painting for me is a journey of learning to look at myself and at the world with less fear. I work with bodily materials such as blood, bone ash and rabbit-skin glue because they help me enter ritual states in which everyday fears recede and my sensations become less filtered. I experience emotion physically, and I see making paintings as a form of body modification. Altering the body can be a way of returning to and reclaiming it; I think of painting similarly, as something that changes me internally while giving birth to something new.

Bodily materials also allow me to think through painting by exploring their interactions with other materials. These materials, alongside Asian mineral pigments and linen, often resist one another physically. Pigments made for paper do not settle easily on linen; blood can become thin or muddy, while bone ash can almost disappear. Rather than correcting these incompatibilities, I work with them. I change the density of rabbit-skin glue so that different areas of the surface absorb or resist pigment, break plaster into fragmented surfaces, and soak linseed oil into linen to create areas of translucency. The painting develops through this negotiation between layers, images, composition and the behaviour of materials. 

My relationship to figuration is influenced by East Asian illustration, where figures are often constructed through line and ethereal beings coexist with the human. I use line as a way of tuning into bodily sensations, allowing figures to remain partly unresolved rather than fixing them too quickly. Through friends working in tattooing, I began drawing my sketches by hand on an iPad using an Apple Pencil and Procreate, both before and during the process of painting. Its layered structure allows me to experiment with different possibilities while the painting is developing.

I often sense an orchestra inhabiting my body, with different instruments sounding their own melodies and weaving together rhythms of psychic states. The process of making is one of listening and translation, through which I explore unstable ecologies of psychic states, the parts of ourselves that are difficult to face, and a persistent search for love despite fear. 

​