STATEMENT OF WORK

Rooted in quiet observation and driven by a lifelong affinity with animals, my work explores the complex and often contradictory ways we relate to the natural world—particularly through systems of display, taxonomy, and preservation. Trained as a painter and shaped by years of living between cultures—across the US and Europe—I’ve become increasingly focused on the entanglement of empathy, extinction, and aesthetics within Natural History collections.

The imagery I work with emerges from deep, sustained engagement: months of drawing at museums, conversations with curators, and ongoing research into animal studies, natural history, and collecting practices. Visits to collections around the world—from Florence and Vienna to Washington D.C.—have informed not only the content of my work, but its ethics and have solidified my commitment to creating work that acknowledges the weight of species loss—not abstractly, but viscerally. In one recent series, animals gradually disappear from one painting to the next, a slow vanishing meant to echo the invisibility of extinction statistics.

Formally, my paintings and drawings are dense, detailed, and compositionally restrained. I often work on a single piece for months, and am particularly conscious of how formal choices—scale, mark-making, colour—carry ethical implications when the subject is a non-human animal. The work resists spectacle; it asks for presence.

In a time when biodiversity loss is often reduced to numbers and headlines, I see painting as a space of resistance—a place where we can reimagine our relationships with other species, even if only momentarily. Through careful looking, I invite viewers to confront the silences, the absences, and the quiet agency that lingers in these preserved bodies. I hope the animals in my work are not only seen, but seen as looking back.