"NO TROPHY, NO FLOWERS, NO FLASHBULBS, NO WINE"

Watercolor on cold pressed gsm 300, 28 in x 20, 2021

I see my work as an intersection of ecology, femininity and spirituality.  My body of work explores the connection of society’s view of femininity and the mirrored way we treat our earth. My paintings imagine what the reversal of this might look like.  

I want to portray femininity without restriction, a femininity from the female gaze.  From a young age women are taught to evaluate ourselves from the other’s perspective, rather than grounding in how we feel within our bodies. I want to create pieces that originate within this sense of grounding, in order to reconnect with our inner selves, and experiencing a sense of homecoming to our bodies as our primal home.  I hope to reclaim and celebrate the female form from the female perspective, in all of it’s varieties and shapes, as inherently luxurious, spacious, and unique.    

I use my own photography or photos that women share with me, and manipulating scale as a method to cultivate possibility in the viewer’s imagination. Portraying our soft mammal bodies in unusual natural elements, I aim to highlight our physical belonging on this planet.  As humans our natural habitats are wild places, which are rapidly diminishing. I hope to create work that portrays humans as being part of the ecosystem, to show that not only do we need to preserve the natural world for the sake of animals, but also for ourselves in order to be fully human and integrated.  Pushing back against anthropocentrism, my paintings explore how to inhabit this earth with greater consciousness and humility.  

My work is a declaration of coming home to yourself, reclaiming your bodies and this earth as home, and to participate in preserving our abundant and diverse habitats. 



Murex Rosa

FEELING LIGHT

FEELING BLUE

SMOOTH BRAIN

TWO 2

TWO 1

"Typical Figure" 

"They're eating the dogs"

"I'M SORRY HONEY"

"THEY DEFTLY MANEUVER for MUSCLE and RANK"

"BOWEL SHAKING EARTHQUAKES OF DOUBT AND REMORSE"

I say endurance for this piece because it felt like such a breakthrough moment. I’ve loved drawing horses since I was a child and I would try and try, but could not get through the frustrations. But keeping at it, and not giving up has shown me what I can do and I can only hope to keep learning to better my work. 

Endurance 

This painting is very special to me. It’s a rendition of my grandmother’s painting of a Navajo man that started her art journey many years ago. It was the first painting she entered into a juried show. Because they did not like the shadow elements, she received quite negative feedback and almost quit pain altogether. She pushed through though and has been such a huge influence in my art journey.

Navajo Elder

Elephants are extremely intelligent and remember things for years. I hoped to capture the expression of aged remembrance through his eye.

Remember 

"HE'S HAUNTED BY SOMETHING SOMETHING HE CANNOT DEFINE // SHE'S HOPING IN TIME THAT HER MEMORY WILL FADE"

"RELUCTANTLY CROUCHED AT THE STARTING LINE"  OIL ON CANVAS  

This current work is based on diving in subterranean cenote caverns near my home. These caves are filled with cold fresh water and rocky depths, where some of the deepest tunnels are said to lead out to the sea. 

  
This body of work is a visual allegory of my experience of postpartum, and the shifting identity of becoming and being a mother. I find myself craving to explore the darkest corners, to normalize, excavate, deep dive into this wild transition into motherhood. This change is evidenced by science, describing the mother’s brain matter changing as dramatically, with similar levels of plasticity as during adolescence. The early days of postpartum and motherhood didn’t afford me much time to reflect on the experience intellectually, but instead within my body and bones I felt rocked by such a dramatic life bearing experience. For me birth was followed by an awareness that a powerful tectonic shift had occurred. I’ve experienced this period of my life as strange, mystical, and also profoundly disorienting. I felt and still feel a mystery to myself. 

  
Full of deepest blue hues, and dark glimmers of light, this work descends into the liminal space of unbecoming, and the practice of recentering amidst the turbulence. I crave the deep quiet and rest that shimmers on the surface of these pieces, only to discover that it is a mirage. The outwardly serene effect is not the inward experience, which plays with the edge of life and death. Water is not our natural element, we cannot survive below the surface for long, and yet we are created, birthed and mostly comprised of it. This work plays with the juxtaposition of this invitation to descend into the unknown, while limited by my breath, and life force. Even so, I can train myself to hold more space within, to build my capacity to explore these shadowy depths.

  

emerge into the light

come up for air

dark and luminous depths

hold breath, hold space 

the anxious inhale

the descent is the prayer

rest into the depths

and i dive deeper within

head above the water 

How can mutual care be connected to desire? Mutual care and Kink are two sides of the same coin. A celebration of mutual care to confront the way disabled people are perceived as a burden. (A gay couple painted in magenta. One man sits on his partner's lap while trimming his beard.)

For My King

Ableist society would take disabled queer rights away and deny our personhood. Alone with each other, kink can reclaim that power by choosing who is worthy of it. Through kink the submissive choses who is deserving of their power and gives it as a gift to that person. By celebrating disabled sexuality and love, the work confronts the way disabled people are desexualized and infantilized. 
(A couple with intentionally ambiguous genders, painted on a green drip background. The shorter person is leaning on a cane while staring into the face of their partner. Their partner is much taller and broader and they look down at their adoring partner.)

Submissive for You

You hold me as my spirit breaks, my soul weeps, my body in agony, and my disability claim denied. Through all this you surround me with so much love and warmth. (An adult is curled in the fetal position with head resting on a curled hand and a sorrowful expression. They lay on the lap of another adult with short curly hair who is stroking their hair.)

Hold My Mind Broken Body

In this moment our breathing slows and we feel the glow. We made our chronically ill bodies so inescapably beautiful that I lost all sense of time and space and self. (A couple painted in blues with yellow highlights. One person in kneeling in front of the other with their head in their partner's lap. The kneeling person looks up at their smiling partner, whose long hair frames the scene.)

Aftermath

Celebrating unedited sexuality confronts the way disabled people are desexualized and infantilized. This work explores the way that kink can reveal unexpected avenues of pleasure tailored to unique bodies. Consensual power dynamics in kink allow people to reclaim the power that society would strip away by choosing who is worthy of it. Disabled queer people are beautiful and sensual as we are, in our unedited queer and disabled forms, accessibility needs and all.  (A non-binary femme is embracing their partner. Their partner is smiling and wearing an ankle brace while being spanked. Bruising is visible on their butt.)

Reclaiming My Body: Impact Play

This work celebrates mutual care and community to challenge the way disabled people are perceived as a burden. Disabled people, in community, are shown as each other's accessibility. Access Intimacy, coined by Mia Mingus, is a feeling of someone understanding & anticipating another’s access needs, enabling a disabled person more agency in their life. (Painted in purples with silver highlights, a bald femme using a cane is being kissed by a smiling femme using a wheelchair.)



Here for All of You

Instead of being infantilized for their accessibility needs, being fed becomes a naughty game of power play.  [A couple painted in yellows and browns. The figure on the left is feeding the figure on the right ravioli.]

This Vulnerable with You

Through kink the submissive choses who is deserving of their power and gives it as a gift to that person.  [A couple is about to kiss. The figure on the right sits in a wheel chair and is gently pulling the figure on the left close by their collar.]

My Power My Love

We are beautiful and sensual as we are, in our unedited queer and disabled forms, accessibility needs and all. [A fat queer couple are locked in loving embrace and smiling into each other's faces.]

As We Are

Access Intimacy, coined by disability justice advocate Mia Mingus, is a way of relating between a disabled person and someone else, where the other person genuinely understands and anticipates the disabled person’s access needs. [A couple is on a date at a restaurant. The figure on the left is cutting the food for the figure on the right.]

Access Intimacy

The polyamorous feeling of joy and fulfillment as I see my partners with each other. My found family has finally found me.

Compersion

Our bodies bend and fold, the spaces between you and I collapsing in on each other.

Milk & Honey

Who do we distract ourselves with or let harm us when our reality on our side of the hospital curtain is too much to bear?

The Other Side of the Curtain

When I enthusiastically surrender all of who I am to you, you hold all my power, all of my achievement and pain and growth in this moment are yours. You free me from my broken body and mind and all me just to be in this moment with nothing in the world but you.

Hunger

What makes you who you are? Why do you bend and fold for me? Why do you allow me to support you? For disabled and queer communities, these chosen and found families hold us and love us in our entirety. 

Why Are You?

“When the Soul wants to experience something she throws out an image in front of her and then steps into it.” Meister Eckhart

House Studies, an ongoing series of un-staged images, first came about when we moved home last March. Just days before the first national lockdown we moved to a remote setting in Kent. Not far from where I grew up, I already had memories of these lanes and how dark and cold the winters could get. This bought an uncanniness about the place; everything appeared enchanting to me, from the formation of dead tree structures, the shape of a new interior, the hooting of owls at dusk, and the transformation of light from day to night.
 
These experiences coincided with my discovery of Jung’s shadow work, which, given the long, early days of lockdown and extended time alone, gave me plenty to pick-over. Running parallel to my inner thoughts and feelings, the images developed over the months and seasons ahead - my personal inventory began to synchronise in some way with my surroundings. What started out as the documentation of a new physical space slowly became more about the psychological one. Time and again I would stubble across the perfect photographic manifestation, sign or symbol. This can be seen in images such as Enter, a moon lit portal into the dark, neighbouring woodland and My Chandelier, a giant stalactite found in a dilapidated outbuilding. Lit with a torch and casting a defined, heavy shadow, it was a discovery that was all at once both terrifying and beautiful.
 
All of the images in the series were made using my iPhone, the freedom of this small, handheld device allowed me to photograph the images as they appeared, without any planning or reconstruction – they were just all around me and I photographed them.

MEETING THE SHADOW

Watercolor on cold pressed gsm 300, 28 x 20 in, 2021

I see my work as an intersection of ecology, femininity and spirituality.  My body of work explores the connection of society’s view of femininity and the mirrored way we treat our earth. My paintings imagine what the reversal of this might look like.  

I want to portray femininity without restriction, a femininity from the female gaze.  From a young age women are taught to evaluate ourselves from the other’s perspective, rather than grounding in how we feel within our bodies. I want to create pieces that originate within this sense of grounding, in order to reconnect with our inner selves, and experiencing a sense of homecoming to our bodies as our primal home.  I hope to reclaim and celebrate the female form from the female perspective, in all of it’s varieties and shapes, as inherently luxurious, spacious, and unique.    

I use my own photography or photos that women share with me, and manipulating scale as a method to cultivate possibility in the viewer’s imagination. Portraying our soft mammal bodies in unusual natural elements, I aim to highlight our physical belonging on this planet.  As humans our natural habitats are wild places, which are rapidly diminishing. I hope to create work that portrays humans as being part of the ecosystem, to show that not only do we need to preserve the natural world for the sake of animals, but also for ourselves in order to be fully human and integrated.  Pushing back against anthropocentrism, my paintings explore how to inhabit this earth with greater consciousness and humility.  

My work is a declaration of coming home to yourself, reclaiming your bodies and this earth as home, and to participate in preserving our abundant and diverse habitats. 



Lambis Lambis

Watercolor on cold pressed gsm, 28 x 20 in, 2021

I see my work as an intersection of ecology, femininity and spirituality.  My body of work explores the connection of society’s view of femininity and the mirrored way we treat our earth. My paintings imagine what the reversal of this might look like.  

I want to portray femininity without restriction, a femininity from the female gaze.  From a young age women are taught to evaluate ourselves from the other’s perspective, rather than grounding in how we feel within our bodies. I want to create pieces that originate within this sense of grounding, in order to reconnect with our inner selves, and experiencing a sense of homecoming to our bodies as our primal home.  I hope to reclaim and celebrate the female form from the female perspective, in all of it’s varieties and shapes, as inherently luxurious, spacious, and unique.    

I use my own photography or photos that women share with me, and manipulating scale as a method to cultivate possibility in the viewer’s imagination. Portraying our soft mammal bodies in unusual natural elements, I aim to highlight our physical belonging on this planet.  As humans our natural habitats are wild places, which are rapidly diminishing. I hope to create work that portrays humans as being part of the ecosystem, to show that not only do we need to preserve the natural world for the sake of animals, but also for ourselves in order to be fully human and integrated.  Pushing back against anthropocentrism, my paintings explore how to inhabit this earth with greater consciousness and humility.  

My work is a declaration of coming home to yourself, reclaiming your bodies and this earth as home, and to participate in preserving our abundant and diverse habitats. 


La Concha Reina

Caught in the slipstream. I received a letter of rejection for a funding grant I'd applied for. I decided to read it out and let it be blown/sucked away. Bye bye rejection! I speed up the sound here as the words are inconsequential. Taking away the comprehension of the words changes their power and makes the performance both gesture centred, and accessible to all. 

Caught in the slipstream

Usually working with paper collage and found images in magazines, I've recently started making digital collages with a mixture of magazines already at home and images found online. There has definitely been the pressure during lockdown to utilise the time and being in two minds between the options of relaxing while you can and to also frantically make and explore new processes with the extra time. My work explores the over saturation of everyday images, contrasting the familiar with the surreal to create constructed worlds, which seems a lot more relevant currently. Combining the familiarity of living spaces with the vast and serine landscapes in these pieces, I think they've taken on an added layer of escapism and collective longing. 

Artist Statement - I’m a paper collage artist who explores the images we see as a part of the everyday to create surreal worlds and alternate realities within the isolated space of a room. I’m fascinated by how collage can be used as a tool to understand our own reality in the age of over saturation and the constant stream of visual information. By repurposing contemporary and vintage magazines, I keep the original images while stretching their function, playing with their rich colours, textures and manipulating scale and perspective. Collage allows for a controlled chaos and the tactile cut and paste process can be just as interesting as its result. Altering the familiar homely environments and hyper reality in the adverts where the images originate, I aim to match the aesthetic of over saturation while immersing the audience in constructed worlds.

Taking Time

An ongoing series of images using documented play as a process to work through family dynamics. In this case play being any activity that has no particular outcome in mind and which often uncovers underlying power structures and emotional states. These images were taken in the course of three different residencies with Takt Kunstprojektraum, Berlin, Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik, Berlin and Ne'na Contemporary Art Space, Chiang Mai.

Some days are easier than others

Collaboration in association with Guildhall and the Barbican to curate a visual sound installation experience around the theme of transition. The installation was set up on 4 screens in a square so that images would appear and disappear forcing the audience to constantly change direction. 

ran from July 2-4 2014

<iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/99166327" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe> <p><a href="http://vimeo.com/99166327">Punctuated Moment</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/racheldelatorre">Rachel de la Torre</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>

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