Artist Statement

Painting helps me process the fleetingness of life. I often think about the passage of time—what is preserved, what is lost, and how an awareness of impermanence can make life feel more vivid. Painting immerses me in the present moment.

I am drawn to 19th-century photographs of women whose lives are largely unknown to history. There is something moving about encountering the trace of a life once fully lived, now held within a single surviving image. Looking at a woman from a time I never knew, I can sense her presence while also becoming aware of everything about her that has disappeared. I am interested in how a single image can hold both at once.

In my current series, begun this year, I transfer these photographs directly onto canvas. To reveal the image, I remove the paper layer by layer—a process that can just as easily damage what I am trying to uncover. Some fragments survive while others disappear, and both become important to how I respond. I allow chance, loss, and discovery to shape the painting rather than trying to control the outcome. Within a structured framework, often a grid, I respond intuitively through color and abstract mark making, using the transfer to become a point of departure. I am interested in what is hidden and revealed, and in allowing the viewer to discover the image gradually rather than being given a fixed narrative.

Nature runs through both my earlier and recent work. In the newer paintings it appears more ephemerally through light, texture, and atmosphere. In my earlier oil portraits, I reimagined 19th-century women within environments and bonnets composed of flora and fauna that become extensions of the figures themselves. These paintings explore the relationship between women and the natural world, reflecting ecological interdependence and the ways in which both are vulnerable to change, disappearance and renewal.

Across both bodies of work, these women connect me to generations who came before me and remind me that my life belongs to a continuous human story. Through engaging with their presence and allowing the painting to transform what remains, I create a record of my own aliveness.