i think i bleed but i wont be able to tell unless i look inside
My practice emerges from an insistence on the body—its horrors, its transparencies, its humor. My fragmented collages articulate the discomfort of being in a body that inhabits and interacts with the distortions of the modern world. In pursuit of portraiture, in pursuit of the human condition, the interior is made exterior. Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection offers a framework through which each painting can be understood. The abject is a psychic process of rejection or expulsion of the horrific, unsettling, and uncanny. Applied to my work, I abject from my vessel, from a mind that endlessly produces and reproduces. Collages expel images onto canvas in a way that sanctifies and immortalizes them.
My work is consumption, I want the viewer to gorge themselves the way I stuff myself full of digital ephemera, of images, of inescapable compulsive thought. My bodies reflect the reality that all humans are mortal containers of organs, perpetually bending and contorting, only moments away from rupturing and ceasing to be. Being a consciousness within a vessel of flesh is an isolating experience. Humans can see others as a complete, coherent form, where each limb connects into a complete autonomous body, yet one’s own body is experienced as disjointed. It is glimpsed through partial angles, a series of disconnected limbs, and reflections. I want to capture this existential dislocation.
The abject blurs the lines between the self and other, interior and exterior. Rather than rely on coherent representation, I render the body from the inside out, allowing interiority to shape color and composition. The act of painting becomes an extension of my subconscious, expelling ideas and impulses onto canvas through the medium of paint. Collections of images serve to visualize interior mental landscapes of fragmented thought. Above all, each work seeks to describe the innate horror of being in a body.
I quickly moved beyond recreating likeness, towards the fragile architectures of bodies, finding portraiture to be a rewarding yet incomplete portrayal of the human condition. I render flesh with a softness that borders on devotional: pastel viscera, translucent skin, decay, impermanence, truth. Juxtaposing vulnerability and violence, cuteness and gore, innocence and the raw mechanics of flesh. In this, I explore what it means to be both a body and a mind, to watch one’s flesh move independently from one's consciousness, to abject from an unescapable vessel.
As a collector of images, I create a visual language that slips between anatomy and allegory—sorting through a thick sludge of media to sanctify and immortalize fleeting images of the digital landscape. Each painting is a product of its time, shaped by the slow festering of the modern consciousness. Yet in my work, I am always sure to address another undeniable truth of the human condition: to look at the simultaneous pain of existence and slap an emoji on it. Humor and existentialism exist within the same breath. To cry out sorrow and blood and guts would be a refusal of my own lived reality, one of forceful, stupid ignorance.
By placing these ephemeral elements alongside the unignorable materiality of flesh, I seek to recontextualize the gaze in a time where everything is visible, yet nothing is truly seen. In my paintings, the interior is made exterior, acknowledging the weight and warmth of living forms, and reconsidering the embodied realities that tether us to the world. In rupturing the human body, I seek to explore the contexts of flesh. How smooth, luminous flesh is savored, and conversely, how discolored pits of oozing boils and wet piles of humanity are recoiled from. I find moments within my work to suggest humanity, but not recreate it.
My grotesque, seductive forms are morbidly fascinating. I disrupt the pornographic pleasure of the gaze, using feminine nude bodies against the revolting, the nonsensical, the innocent. The viewer is both compelled and repelled at once. What disturbs order is abject; my blatant and monumental depictions of unwanted vessels immortalize the grotesque. Painting is a medium that transcends the living artist; the flesh depicted will cease to be long before the canvas begins to rot.
Abjection is a dissonance between the self and the other. Beyond a bodily disconnect, I experience a rift between the flesh and the mind. The feeling of being skin thinly stretched across a series of bones and organs. A sack of penetrable flesh, a slow rot that is constantly felt, only disrupted through the distractions of the digital landscape. The interior feels closer to true self-portraiture than the exterior, for I am not the one who experiences my outward appearance. What I feel is my lungs sputtering for air, my hair draping itself across my neck, my stomach folding and expanding, the weight of fat, the rigidity of bones. I attempt to confront the uncomfortable reality of being a brain within a vessel, feeling in control yet vulnerable to illness, decay, and death. My own body abjects from itself, and in turn, I want to abject from it.
There is an innate horror in being constricted in a body that is inescapably perceived. Kristeva writes that abjection challenges the borders of the self by thrusting something unclean into the mind. The self is defined by limitation; one cannot know oneself without knowing what one is not, who one is in contrast to an idealized form. I want to repel the gaze through violence, I want to gouge the eyes of the watcher, but I want nothing more than to be watched, savored, lusted after. I want to cut away all of my hair, my lips, my skin up to my eyes until that much-requested smile is plastered on my face. I want to cease to be, I want to live forever, I want to eat myself, I want to eat everything else.
Through fragmented imagery and raw, visceral portraiture, I suggest the instability of identity itself. The horror in my paintings is existential; it emerges from the recognition that the body is both familiar and estranged, a vessel shaped by uncontrolled forces. I always find myself returning to the body: vulnerable, visceral, luminous. Offering flesh, fur, impermanence—as antidote, as truth, as clarity, as lived, felt reality.