"Rewilding" Painting

I make work about what it feels like to exist in a world that was not built for you.

My practice is rooted in lived experience - depression, anxiety, ADHD, and the persistent sensation of being structurally misaligned with the systems and structures that surround me. These are not subjects I observe from the outside. They are the conditions from which the work emerges.

The visual language I use (cartoon characters, robots, hybrid creatures rendered in bold colour and graphic form) is not incidental to the work. It is the work. These characters exist at a threshold: between the biological and the mechanical, between vulnerability and enhancement, between the human body as it is and the question of what it might become.

I find myself drawn to transhumanism; to the idea that human limitations might be transcended, that the parts of us that cause suffering might be redesigned. For someone who experiences their own brain as something that doesn't run on the standard operating system, the appeal of that idea is not abstract. But I hold it with uncertainty. The work does not advocate for transhumanism so much as it circles the question, drawn to its promise and wary of what it might cost.

There is also a tension in the work between how it looks and what it carries. The brightness, the accessible forms, the playful surface - these mirror something true about the experience of neurodivergence and mental ill-health. We learn, early, to present cheerfully. We develop a fluency in appearing fine. The work does the same thing, and it asks the viewer to look again.

What I keep returning to is the question itself: what if we could change not ourselves, but the systems we are forced to inhabit? I do not have an answer. I am not sure I trust the answers that exist. But I think the question is worth living inside - and that is where the work begins.