About
I grew up in a home where religion and everyday life were inseparable. Prayer, dreams, work and family life existed alongside one another, creating a world in which the visible and invisible carried equal weight. This early experience continues to shape my paintings and informs my interest in the unstable relationship between perception, belief and knowledge.
My work explores the ways we come to understand ourselves through family structures, inherited narratives and social expectations, particularly in relation to womanhood. I am interested in the notions that shape identity from beyond conscious control: grief passed between generations, systems of belief, domestic roles, social conventions and the intensity of female relationships. These structures often remain invisible, yet they utilize a powerful influence on how one sees oneself and others.
For several years my paintings have centred on the relationship between loss and hope as opposing conditions that continually reshape perception over time. Influenced by seventeenth-century Dutch still-life painting, I developed a body of work composed of fragmented interiors, landscapes, body details and symbolic objects. Gradually these paintings became darker, moving towards a visual language in which forms recede into shadow and remain unresolved. Drawing on my background in photography and darkroom experimentation, I began to think of these paintings as underexposed images, where meaning emerges indirectly through absence, obscurity and partial uncovering.
More recently, this inquiry expanded into a parallel body of work concerned with the opposite condition: overexposure. If darkness conceals, excessive light can also obscure. In these paintings, forms emerge only to dissolve again, consumed by brightness and reduced to fragments. The contrast between underexposure and overexposure has become a way of thinking about perception itself. Both conditions reveal its fragility and its susceptibility to failure through either absence or excess.
I work from personal photographs, found imagery and intuitive drawing. Through their combination, figures, objects and scenes become symbolic rather than descriptive. I am less interested in depicting particular events than in constructing psychological spaces with different states of consciousness: memory and observation, belief and loss.
Recently female figures have reappeared in the paintings in the form of self-portraits. Emerging from these symbolic landscapes, they function less as representations than as presences through which broader questions of identity and perception can be explored. The self-portrait becomes an unreliable mirror, an image suspended between appearance and experience. Through these works I explore ways of adaptation developed within family and social systems. I am interested in what might be described as female camouflage: the roles, performances and strategies through which women navigate imposed expectations. Like the fool, the jester or the trickster, certain figures occupy an ambiguous position between vulnerability and performance, sincerity and disguise.
Their instability reflects a wider concern that runs throughout the work: the difficulty of distinguishing what is genuine from what is inherited, imposed or imagined. Through the painting process, I search for images that can hold these contradictions without resolving them. The paintings attempt to inhabit the space between what can be known and what remains hidden.
June 2026