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. 

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I am actively engaging in a return to the past in terms of aesthetics and ideals within art making and what art should be defined as. Appropriating William Morris designs led me to a direct comparison between his rejection of the newly industrialised world and the digital age we are living in, which is a significant contributor to society's collective anxiety. I have been thinking more deeply about why my work is deeply rooted in historical aesthetics and why I am returning to the past in my practice, and have come to the realisation that returning to traditional techniques in fine art painting, but also this idea of honing a skill or a craft is a form of escapism,  or a means of exercising control, which is ultimately something one lacks when anxiety takes over.