K BLICK ARTIST
ARTIST STATEMENT
We are formed by what distorts us.
My paintings explore the relationships between human and nonhuman life, questioning the boundaries and hierarchies through which the natural world is understood. Drawing on encounters with the natural world and mythology, I imagine worlds in which familiar relationships are unsettled and new possibilities emerge.
Mythology offers a space in which established narratives can be reimagined, shifting the roles and relationships of humans, animals and the natural world. Rather than preserving their inherited meanings, I bring these narratives into contact with contemporary experience, allowing different worlds to meet and transform one another.
Alongside my paintings on canvas, I work with traditional Portuguese ceramic tiles, drawing on the visual language and techniques of seventeenth-century Portuguese Baroque tiles. Through this material, I extend my exploration of painting into a historical medium, allowing inherited forms and contemporary imagery to encounter and transform one another.
Within the paintings, figures merge, separate, emerge and disappear, moving between figuration and abstraction. Forms shift and transform through their encounters, suggesting a world in which identities and relationships are never entirely fixed.
My practice has gradually moved beyond questioning established boundaries towards exploring how new worlds may emerge through relationships between different forms of existence. Distortion is not simply a change in appearance, but evidence of encounter—of how one existence may be transformed through its relationship with another.