Artist Statement
My artistic practice unfolds through painting, drawing, monotype, and traditional hand-painted animation. I am interested in zones of friction between human and non-human worlds, between visible and invisible bodies, between what is spoken and what resists language. My works are inhabited by familiar figures: women, animals, and natural forces — presences that question our modes of perception and relation.
Empathy and sympathy are guiding threads in my practice. I seek to create images that blur the distance between human and animal, between the familiar and the strange, revealing both our similarities and the irreducible otherness of the other. Few things are as unsettling and intense as the silent meeting of two gazes — when the animal looks back at us, language suddenly fails.
The exchange of gazes thus becomes an anchoring point in my research. Jacques Derrida evokes in The Animal That Therefore I Am the destabilizing power of the animal’s gaze, which strips the human bare and opens up an unmediated face-to-face encounter.
I am struck by the parallels between the ways women and animals are, and have been, viewed and treated. For centuries, women have been considered only partially human: too irrational, too wild, too uncontrollable; perceived as weak and dangerous at the same time, something to be tamed. The witch has historically been seen as bestial, often accompanied by or associated with animals. This history is not abstract to me; it shapes the way I inhabit my own body and the bodies I paint.
Layering, transparency, and stratification guide my method. Painting becomes a threshold of hospitality for the unexpected, the other, the living. Within it, I construct images that question our place among beings and open toward new forms of listening and coexistence. In its very making, painting becomes a space of possibility for the unplanned and the unforeseen — an open space that welcomes the intruder and the foreign, the untamed, the non-human.
