I began using portraiture to examine performativity, identity construction and regeneration. My development process typically involves photography and building a relationship with subjects, drawing on their individuality, outlook and self-perceptions. This interaction with subjects ensures portraits are not a rigid reproduction of imagery. My emotive, familiarity with the subject and their features disrupts objectivity. Instead, this process allows many faces and poses to emerge and evolve as the painting does, taking on a life of its own as it continuously becomes something else. What else could better reflect the ‘self’?

Self-portraiture is an important part of my practice, inspiring new connections between paint and psychological themes. My work aims to disrupt highly curated images of beauty associated with modern consumer culture that communicates eroticism, passivity, performativity and discomfort. Portraiture should depict subjects with confidence, autonomy, vulnerability, and honesty. The painting process gives identity narratives back to the artist, the sitter and the ‘self’ , a shifting, unfixed, wholly biased and living concept.