My work is rooted in the exploration of realism and my interest in rendering the human figure with a likeness to nature. Heavily informed by art historical representational painting, I merge the melodrama of the Italian Baroque with the Pre-Raphaelite’s sense of ethereality to create compositions that blur the line between reality and a dreamlike state. Looking within and to other artists, writers and poets, I describe the feeling of perpetual anxiety through overwhelmingly busy compositions that see my subjects lost within intricate, layered patterns. Specifically I am attempting to describe a dissociate disorder called derealisation that I experienced, in which one feels detached from the world and their body, a strange phenomenon that feels like you are dreaming while fully conscious. I have been using poetry as a vessel to inform my work, as it is often a source of rich visual imagery, and has been responded to in the past by the Pre-Raphaelites that I look to for inspiration.