Practice Statement

Adapted after critique and peer discussions.

Artist Statement

I work with materials that absorb: newspapers, plywood, debris, things that carry systems, headlines, and histories, they are also from my childhood. But I’m less interested in what they say, and more in what they do to us, how we internalise structures we don’t fully understand. My work begins with the belief that the body knows before the mind. That gut feeling, tension, or heat under the skin, that’s where my practice lives.

Across sculpture, painting, and object-making, I explore how information becomes sensation. My newspaper fields are soft surfaces built from layers of crisis and propaganda, emotion pressed through order. My vessels come from these fields, reshaped into forms that were once meant to hold water, but can not do so. They’ve lost their function, yet gained intensity: rough, aesthetic, strange. Their interiors are unruly, built with a logic that doesn’t quite hold, fragile architectures that speak through touch.

My paintings extend this research into flatness. I use the limitations of the canvas, its lack of depth, its stillness, to ask how affect can survive without volume. I’m not trying to illustrate emotion. I want the surface to pulse with something unspeakable. Colour becomes pressure. Marks are made with instinct, not intention. The result may feel serene, but it’s built from conflict.

What connects all these works is a tension between order and collapse, rationality and feeling. I don’t aim to explain. I want to create a moment where the viewer feels first, and only then begins to ask: what just moved in me?

Artist Statement - Newspaper Fields

In a climate where beauty is often mistaken for naïveté, I’m interested in what happens when pleasure becomes a site of political tension.

My Newspaper Fields series is made from recycled newspapers, headlines of war, propaganda, crisis, layered by hand, then covered with soft, even fields of colour. The surface appears calm, but underneath is a dense architecture of conflict. The news isn’t gone; it’s absorbed, buried, controlled. Colour becomes a kind of erasure, one that soothes, but also suppresses.

This process began from a personal place. I experience synaesthesia, so for me, colour isn’t symbolic - it’s visceral. It has weight, shape, rhythm. These fields aren’t abstractions; they’re emotional topographies. But over time, I began to see how these sensory responses could be manipulated. Not just by artists, by systems of power.

Soviet propaganda, for instance, didn’t aim for “beauty” in a romantic or Impressionist sense. But it used visual seduction, bold colour, emotional clarity, heroic design, to generate pride, certainty, identity. That too is a kind of beauty. Not decorative, but directive.

My work engages that kind of seduction. It invites, reassures, simplifies, and in doing so, reveals how easily comfort can become control. The smooth surface offers no resistance. It tells you: you’re safe here. You don’t need to ask what’s missing.

Pleasure can disarm critique. I use that deliberately, not to comfort, but to interrupt. To create a moment of pause: What are we no longer questioning? What disappears when the surface feels too good?

I believe emotion can be political. That softness can be sharp. That care, in its material form, in its aesthetic presence, can be confrontational. I’m interested in collapsing the old hierarchy between intellect and feeling, where critique is assumed to be cold and analytical, and emotion is dismissed as indulgent or decorative.

My colour fields carry that contradiction. They are made by hand, built from the daily debris of politics, but presented as serene. That tension is the point. Beauty isn’t the opposite of critique; it can be its most effective camouflage.

Artist Statement - Vessels

These sculptures may resemble vessels, but they no longer hold water. What they hold is something else, a kind of collapse, a memory of function, an emotional tension that can’t be contained.

Each piece begins with my newspaper fields, built from layers of media, colour, and control. I wrap this material around a rigid wooden core — a structure that doesn’t follow logic, but still holds. These inner skeletons often feel like bodies: wounded, stitched, still standing.

The vessels are pierced with wood and debris, fragments from my studio, leftovers from construction. They carry both care and damage. Their surfaces are fragile, textured, deeply material; you feel them before you understand them.

To me, these forms are portraits of something internal. They look outward, but speak inward. Built from what’s broken, they ask not what they were made for, but what still moves within them.