My practice, primarily focused on painting, explores the relationship between everyday experience and imagined realities. My MA research, ‘Reclaiming Fantasy: The Female Protagonist in Works of Visual Art, Literature and Film’ focused on characterisations of female protagonists in popular fantasy films, examining narratives of desire, transformation and escape. Through paintings that combined domestic spaces with the visual language of fantasy, I investigated how imagined worlds could function as sites of aspiration and possibility. Building on this research, my current practice considers how fantasy, aspiration and make believe operate within contemporary life. Drawing on personal experience, everyday observation and the projected fantasy of social media, 1 am interested in the ways individuals construct narratives about themselves and their futures, and how these narratives shape our understanding of reality.

My use of paint is influenced by observations of colour in film and the saturation of light from projected images, borrowing from montage and allowing familiar imagery to appear unexpectedly. Projection and collage are enacted during the painting process to blur the boundaries between observed reality and constructed pictorial space. Through painting, I explore the meeting point of the mundane and the imagined, creating images that reflect on the desires, anxieties and contradictions embedded within everyday life.