Artist Statement
My practice begins from rupture rather than continuity. Growing up while navigating estranged family relationships shaped an early understanding that meaning is unstable, provisional, and often formed through absence. That instability became a kind of training ground for perception—learning how to stay with what does not resolve. What remained was a way of seeing that does not look away: an attention that is hard-earned and exacting.
My work operates in the space where physical environments and psychological interiors collapse into one another—within landscapes where the uncanny persists, and pressure accumulates. I work with fragments drawn from historical residue, and the visual language of late-20th-century mystery and adventure narratives, not as nostalgia, but as tools: unstable scaffolding for a psychological terrain shaped by collision, obstruction, and return.
Painting and drawing function as acts of invocation rather than strict depiction. Images operate as charged vessels—unstable, incomplete, resistant to closure. The work excavates without restoring, records without resolving, and refuses transcendence. If anything is sought, it is not illumination, but contact: brief, difficult, and sufficient. The work is not strictly illustrative or didactic; it offers conditions. It looks to unsettle, slow, or linger, that disturbance is intentional—an opening where attention shifts, and new forms of engagement become possible.
In a post-Romantic culture that treats introspection as performance and trauma as currency, descent is neither heroic nor redemptive. It is slow, resistant, and unfinished. Attention replaces catharsis. Endurance replaces clarity. This work rejects the contemporary demand for revelation, in favor of a sublime that is less about being overwhelmed and more about encountering what cannot be fully grasped. In the studio and through the work itself, I look to embrace John Keats theory of “Negative Capability”, by cultivating the ability to embrace uncertainty, mystery, and doubt without the "irritable reaching after fact and reason".
While my work continues to orbit questions central to phenomenological inquiry—what can be known through our senses, what resists being known, and what remains when presence is sustained long enough—it is also a reflection of the increasingly inhospitable and destabilized world we inhabit. The physical, ecological and geographical landscapes we inhabit are haunted not only by the past but by the imagined futures and dreamworlds of progress. It is here I have trained my senses.