Artist Statement

I work across sculpture, textiles and installation, currently through two interlinked strands: Pool and Soft. Both are concerned with the seductive power of self-estrangement - moments of voluntary displacement in which pleasure, illusion, and unease begin to overlap, and agency slips - and are informed, in part, by my experience of a psychoanalysis.

In Pool, I’m interested in artifice and illusion, and in the eerie but pleasurable sense of dislocation they can provoke. In high-contrast, imagined spaces, discordances of scale and depth produce brief, seductive perceptual slippages, inviting a willing participation in the Irreal.

Soft approaches self-estrangement as something more immersive, and perhaps more costly. These works explore comfort: its capacity to soothe, but also to seduce or suffocate.

The Soft Cell series frames the padded cell not as prison, but as seductive retreat, an escape from the conditions of the present. I’m interested in the impulse toward comfort - the desire to be held, weightless - and in what might be relinquished when agency is exchanged for frictionlessness.

The Soft Core works extend this logic into practices of self-soothing, where comfort is entangled with imagery, consumption, and sensation, and desire folds back on itself. We consume to be consumed: the erotic circulates without clear object or release, seduction becomes diffuse rather than anchored, and elective self-estrangement is sustained.

Materiality is central to my practice - the precise degree of tension with which fabric contains its stuffing, the balance between resistance and give, containment and pressure. The padded forms are themselves seductive: dimpled, rounded, bodily. Their scale and openings invite proximity, insertion - an instinctive desire to touch. As that impulse is caught, physical energy rebounds back into the body as an erotic reflex, and affect operates critically through a state of uneasy, complicit arousal.

Across these bodies of work, illusion and comfort function less as escapes than as structures we willingly enter and sustain. Seduction is not incidental but organising: it draws us in, holds us, implicates us. What presents as relief is inseparable from the state it appears to answer - an attenuated mode of comfort bound to the conditions of postmodernity itself. I’m interested in that tethered state: suspended between pleasure and unease, participation and distance, where elective self-estrangement is sustained.