My practice explores the human condition and the ways we drift away from ourselves. Beginning with
pencil and charcoal hyperrealism, I currently create more expressive acrylic portraiture, using the face as a
site for storytelling.
My recent work investigates distraction in various contexts: war, grief, politics, mental illness, technology,
anxiety, and other forces that distance us from presence. In these portraits, exaggerated googly eyes are
encircled with yarn wound into tight spirals. The spirals may suggest hypnosis, a death or repetition, a
visual language for the cycles we become trapped in. They function as both adornment and obstruction,
hinting at how what we fixate on begins to shape how we see.
The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han similarly asserts that contemporary individuals are no longer
oppressed by external forces alone, but by an internalized pressure to produce, perform, and remain
constantly engaged. Han describes a state of self-imposed exhaustion, where overstimulation and endless
activity lead to a quiet burnout of the psyche. While digital culture informs this work, it is only one lens
through which I approach a broader question. My relationship with technology becomes a personal entry
point into a more universal condition—the ways we cope, withdraw, and surrender attention.
Through repetitive mark-making, winding, layering, slowing down, I mirror and interrupt these cycles.
The work almost functions as therapy, resisting immediacy and emphasizing stillness. Ultimately, the work
examines residual existences, what remains of us when our attention is corrupted.