ABOUT

What appears is what recedes. What's traced disappears in the tracing.

My practice investigates how identity constructs itself under conditions of perceptual and psychological instability. The work emerges from lived experience of dissociative consciousness - states where stable selfhood, object permanence, and meaning-making systems regularly thin or collapse. Painting becomes both diagnostic tool and constructive method: a means of validating existence through material engagement while simultaneously mapping the instability that necessitates such validation.

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I work exclusively in black and white oil pastel applied with brush and rubbed into surface. This material constraint eliminates chromatic information, focusing vocabulary entirely on pattern, texture, density, and tonal variation. The process begins with gestural mark-making, followed by extended periods of extreme magnification where I physically approach the surface until haptic vision overtakes optical distance. In this proximity, I don't impose invented forms but discover and outline details already present in the accumulated marks.

This methodology reflects a specific relationship to authorship and agency. I work with imaginary images based on unreachable memory, tracing and concealing them iteratively. The painting is given agency; I follow what it reveals. This subordination of authorial intention to material discovery addresses a psychological condition: when selfhood feels unstable, visual creations struggle to maintain existence confidently. Instead, I outline what already exists, bringing marks into visibility, giving them definition, almost like developing identity with confidence in its presence.

Yet the composition resists settlement. I paint detailed renderings of gestural strokes, then cover them with additional gesture, then detail those again. Figures appear and vanish. Forms coalesce toward recognition then dissolve before stabilizing. This reveal-conceal structure enacts identity that cannot sustain itself, collapsing in cycles.

The practice maps a trajectory from dissolution toward provisional stability, acknowledging collapse while maintaining engagement.