“Imagination becomes both refuge and resistance: a place to retreat, a means to question, and a way to imagine otherwise.”

 I paint as a way of making sense of the world - and, at times, of making an entirely different one.

My practice explores the space between the familiar and the fantastical, where the ordinary can become strange, symbolic and full of possibility. Working predominantly through portraiture and still life, I draw on personal experiences of motherhood, identity, memory and place, alongside an enduring fascination with flora and fauna. These familiar subjects become vessels through which I explore the more elusive territory of belonging, transformation, mortality and the construction of personal worlds.

At the centre of my practice is a belief in the profound power of imagination. I am interested in what happens when we allow ourselves to step outside the logic of everyday life - to exaggerate, embellish, rearrange and invent. In this space, painting becomes an act of both escape and reclamation. Imagination becomes both refuge and resistance.

My visual language draws from the Surrealists and the rich symbolic traditions of Dutch Golden Age painting, particularly memento mori and pronkstilleven. I am drawn to the way these traditions transform objects, animals, flowers and material abundance into carriers of hidden meaning. Yet where the traditional memento mori reminds us of death and the fleeting nature of existence, I am interested in what happens when that anxiety is deliberately disrupted - when mortality, uncertainty and contemporary unease are met with colour, humour, fantasy and joy.

My paintings often begin with something recognisable: a face, a flower, an animal, an object from everyday life. Through composition, colour and symbolic association, these elements are displaced from their expected context and allowed to take on new meanings. The resulting worlds are deliberately ambiguous. They can be beautiful and unsettling, playful and melancholic, intimate and strange. I want the viewer to feel that something is happening beneath the surface, even if its meaning remains just out of reach.

This tension is important to me. I am not interested in using painting simply to document experience, but in transforming it. Personal experience becomes a point of departure - something to be translated, distorted and reimagined until it becomes something larger than itself. In this process, painting offers a way to hold contradictions that are difficult to reconcile in everyday life: joy alongside anxiety, beauty alongside impermanence, vulnerability alongside strength.

In my animal paintings I’m removing them from their natural environments and placing them into staged tableaus (such as celebrating or interacting as a group), the animals function as stand-ins for human characters. The works explore complex social dynamics, interpersonal connections, and memory through a non-human lens.

Ultimately, I paint to create places that do not quite exist - but perhaps feel as though they could. These imagined worlds are not an escape from reality so much as a way of looking back at it differently. Through colour, symbolism and make-believe, I seek to transform the weight of the everyday into something curious, joyful and alive.