Artist's Statement

I use my work to explore an interior landscape; excavating imagery for meaning and attempting to understand the present by examining the past. My paintings use portraiture, narrative, psychoanalytic dream imagery, and free association, to examine questions of identity, family history and the relationship between the personal and the universal. These acrylic canvases reference archival family photographs as a point of departure for this inquiry into the hidden psychological motivations and patterns that undergird family mythologies. Issues of war, survival, immigration and second-generation trauma are also explored.

I reimagine original black and white source material as full-colour imagery, to heighten visual impact while bringing the past into the present. Through this layered exploration of family dynamics and biography, the viewer may initially see these images as benign or nostalgic, only to have their sense of comfort upended by surreal elements that are sometimes darkly humorous, sometimes foreboding. The viewer is invited to witness the emotional specificity of someone else’s family, and then relate it to the mythologies of their own. My paintings are suffused with magic realism, and are further influenced by neoclassicism, commercial advertising and storybook art, and a design sense borne of an award-winning career in animation.