ARTIST STATEMENT

I interweave motifs from disparate genres and time periods - from Old Master history painting to Eastern miniatures - to explore magic, mysticism and the future for humanity. My visual narratives counter historical representations of the figure in painting. To dismantle gendered hierarchies long embedded in our visual culture, I insert feminine or camp motifs - flowers, unicorns, and fairies, for example - into traditionally masculine genres. The presence of monsters and mythic beings further suggests that these are spaces where identity is fluid. While fantastical, the environs I depict are not purely imaginary - they stage a return of the repressed. I conjure the magic that has been expunged from the rationalist, technocratic logic of our lived reality. By fusing together ideas from ancient esoteric mystery schools with contemporary questions about who we are and where we came from, I’m constructing a novel folklore, unraveling centuries of power relations and imagining a new future.