ARTIST STATEMENT

I use painting to explore the body — most often the female body — as fluid and continually changing rather than as a fixed identity. I am drawn to moments when the boundaries between bodies, identities and species become unstable. Influenced by Bracha Ettinger's concept of the matrixial borderspace, I am interested in vulnerability, connection and the ways our understanding of the body is shaped by cultural ideas of beauty and abjection.

My paintings are populated by fragmented figures, umbilical cords, placentas, webs, skeletal forms, cosmetic interventions and animal bodies, which emerge and dissolve through successive layers of paint. By placing biological processes alongside cosmetic intervention, I bring together the body's capacity to grow, change and decay with the cultural pressures to control and idealise it. Animals recur throughout the work, collapsing distinctions between the human and the animal and reflecting mortality, instinct and our impulse to impose hierarchies on bodies and nature. Among them, the spider recurs as a figure of protection and interdependence. While the motif carries strong maternal associations, particularly through Louise Bourgeois, I am interested in the spider as a structure of connection as much as a symbol of the maternal body.

The work develops through an intuitive, materially responsive process. Beginning with charcoal drawing, I build surfaces through monoprint, dripping, scribbling and gestural mark-making. I repeatedly edit, erase and rework the surface, allowing images to emerge through an exchange between intention, accident and material. Made on the floor, the canvas becomes a space for accumulation, erasure and transformation rather than a fixed image plane.

I use the grotesque not simply to shock, but to open up questions around vulnerability, connection and change. I want the paintings to create a space in which viewers can stay with what is unfamiliar or uncomfortable, allowing their responses to remain open rather than prescribing a single interpretation.