Degree Show 2025

My degree show, “Sandcastles”, consists of a series of paintings, sculptures, and light installations.  I am interested in embodying paradoxes simultaneously, as I think that this is more accurate to the truth than a separation of “opposing forces” such as birth and decay, beauty and abjection, beginning and end. Breathing life into disregarded objects, I use whatever I can get my hands on as a base to facilitate my world-building. Adopting things that I find that were meant to be mine and giving them happy new homes. The objects decide where they want to be, communicating by sending me visions of creatures. I try to celebrate the impermanence and the consistency of iterations as a rule. I do this by painting, glueing and sewing things onto other things. Each piece is an attempt to create an item of ultimate value as a gift for myself, but no matter how beautiful or serious I try to make it, the work always looks back at me with a wink. This is probably because I rub dust and glitter into all of it. I ground my exaggerated illustrations with the free texture afforded to me by things that have been aged over time. There is a beauty that can only be achieved by something being affected repeatedly and consistently throughout time, like the rings in a tree or the marks on a school desk. I am endlessly inspired by the way that this looks and feels, because it contains a beginning, middle, and end all at once. As I allow these narratives to unfold, one after another, a tower made of women emerges to remind me that cake tastes worse with mould on it, but looks a lot better.