artist statement

My painting practice explores vulnerability, resilience and fragility through the tension between organic gesture, graphic structure and material surface. Depending on scale, I work flat across a table, upright against the studio wall, or directly on the floor. I paint on canvas and linen, often choosing to stretch the material only once the piece is significantly developed. Through these shifting approaches, I allow visceral, organic gestures to collide with rigid, manufactured structures.

My work relies on an intentional, pared-back flatness, rooted in my early childhood memories of staring at Ukrainian Orthodox church frescos during long Sunday services in Canada. I am drawn to the directness of pre-academic painting, particularly the psychological space created by devotional compositions without traditional perspectival depth. These early visual references collide with influences from 1980s and 1990s graphic design, skate culture and vintage video games.

This intersection informs the bold palettes, distressed surfaces and spatial tension within my work. I use open-ended visual markers, such as the egg form or bold geometries, allowing them to operate without fixed meanings. Materiality is central to the process, and I experiment with physical limits by moving between intimately scaled, rigid panels and canvases measuring up to two metres. I build structural layers through acrylic and oil application, printmaking inks, and physically pressing plastic egg cartons into paint to create relief patterns. These same disposable forms are also cast into delicate, sharp-edged glass and Jesmonite sculptures.

By placing bold, graphic forms against raw or distressed fields of colour, I bring together control and instability, containment and exposure. The resulting work holds together seemingly contradictory qualities: fragility and resilience, the organic and the manufactured, the devotional and the everyday.