STATEMENT OF WORK

My practice is influenced by my personal history dealing with loss and traces of memories, as well as challenging universal narratives of identity, belonging, and attachment using fictional narratives. I am primarily a painter, but I also engage in drawing, animation, and tapestry. The process of making serves as an introspective tool, allowing me to tell stories about parting, intimacy, and attachment. It revolves around constructing images, depicting fleeting memories, and visualising mental images. Questions I aim to address during painting include what one perceives as reality, and what causes an image to shift from truth into fiction, exploring the uncanny stages in between. I also work with ideas connected to the numerous possibilities of interpretation, the many variables of a single story and the subjectivity of storytelling in relation to our own experiences. The aim is to create layered impressions of familiarity and mystery, closeness and distance, and reality and fiction.

My process begins by collecting images and objects, delving into an archive of materials belonging to my family and sourcing images from the internet. I use this found material to develop sketches and drawings, which form the basis of paintings. I work from recollections of places, people, and objects, then construct imagery that is partly remembered partly imagined, making the work an amalgamation of ideas, memory-aids, and fantasies. Putti has been a central motif in my recent works, the cherubic figures seen in paintings of the Renaissance and Baroque period, to explore the personification of human spirit and emotion. In classical art, they were manifestations of invisible essences believed to influence human lives. The works delve into the ghostly presence and materiality of porcelain figurines, contrasting the solidity of the medium with its fluid appearance, their purposeful resemblance to humans, and their eerie, haunting hollowness. I perceive the sculptures as containers holding onto memories and symbols of ghosts, acting as metaphors for the weight of the past, and exploring how vessels can act as carriers of emotive potential. Tureens, vases, and tea sets extend my exploration of domesticity and womanhood, touching upon ideas of home, class, representation, and inherited social customs.

This body of work represents my own cabinet of curiosities, a fictional microcosm of histories, ideas, archives of images, objects, and narratives extracted from memories. The paintings may initially seem as innocent and playful depictions of fairy-tale-like scenes, but they reveal darker and deeper meanings upon extended viewing. The merge between Western mythology, and Eastern traditions and techniques is often employed to narrate stories about experiences of desire, fear, or longing. In my practice, both the human characters and the ceramics are protagonists and are of equal importance. I am interested in the personification of inanimate objects and finding pleasure in the domestic and the mundane, exaggerated to an extent where they become surreal. This offers a space for them to speak, transfer feelings, and become emblematic. By rendering the figurines large scale, I breathe life into them, giving them presence, dynamism, and a sense of personality. The works overall develop a visual language of doubling and mirroring, shaped by an interplay between foreground and background, animation and rigidity, and past and present.