ABOUT

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.

​

I work almost 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. My process centers on outlining rather than invention. I position myself centimeters from the surface, discovering and defining details already embedded in accumulated marks. I then spend 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. The resulting works present as dense, nearly impenetrable black surfaces where forms flicker between recognition and dissolution.

This methodology reflects a specific relationship to authorship and agency. 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.

What I'm investigating is whether identity that cannot sustain itself can still construct something through sustained material engagement. Each work maps instances where consciousness attempts to organize itself through obsessive outlining of what already exists. The coherence is provisional and temporary, yet the act of tracing becomes, however briefly, stable ground.