Your work often incorporates symbols from Catholicism: sacred icons, particularly depictions of Mary, are reinterpreted with an undertone of pain and unease. Why did you make this choice? What is your relationship with religion, or what are your beliefs? How do you approach themes of death and the soul, and how are they reflected in your paintings?

I’m fascinated by the primal yearning to access ‘spirit’. A realm beyond the physical body, the collective longing for the sacred, and the temporal ruptures that occur sparsely in life, where time is still & we enter a place of transcendence.
Ive often felt a bit between worlds, not quite connecting to my present environment but also not stepping too far into the mystic void. I’m not religious at all but icons or places of worship represent these third spaces & relics humans hold in the need to transport to another realm, real or imagined. The opulence & desperation* to ‘believe’ also reflects an urgency of make believe.
Equally I’m not naive to the dual weight of shame & control religious icons symbolise. A friend who was raised Catholic shared with me that to her the Virgin Mary is a cruel symbol of the impossible ideal of a woman. The mother who continuously gives, weeping and nursing for another, yet always remaining a ‘virgin’ untouched. When I look at medieval religious paintings or witness monks swinging plumes of smoke in silver orbs, its all so curiously bizarre & abstract. Perhaps because I have no religious ties I perceive the rituals & icons within churches as so theatrical & dramatic. I love that they can exist quite unnoticed inside say a metropolitan city. Magical realism! The other month I took a little pilgrimage to Milan to visit an Ossuary (a chapel of bones), where the walls, alter, almost every surface is decorated with real human bones & skulls. They say it was built atop an ancient cemetery with an abundance of plague victims. Now standing as relic. It felt like such a profound piece of art, submerging one in the metaphorical dance of death. The chapel was so graciously adorned, with peeling pink walls, red roses, tiled floor and frescoes, that the bones lost their morbidity, they were like decorative shells or mosaic. A way of looking at dead objects as a natural cycle of life.

When did your fascination with this imagery begin? Did it emerge during your adolescence, adulthood, or has it been rooted in you since childhood? Were there already dark influences in your early years, a fascination with the macabre, visceral, or unsettling? Does it align with your personal past?

I grew up between London and Majorca in the Spanish Balearics which is very Catholic, so I imagine those materials had an imprint, the lace, the gilded wax statues, the incredibly ornate churches. But it was when I was traveling alone in Merida, Yucatan some years ago that I had the idea to paint Madonna’s. There’s so many layers of the spirit in Mexico, with the lost knowledge of the Maya, the pain and sacrilege of religion led by the brutal conquistadors & missionaries, together with such astonishing vibrancy of color, and nature. The celebration of the dead. Pain and beauty side by side. It was my first trip away after the world was closed down during covid, and on the first evening in Merida I found myself watching a cathedral congregation. I was just a spectator not knowing any of the people or the meanings of the prayers & songs they sang. But having been isolated for months to then being submerged in a space of worship & song was incredibly sensory & emotional. I later learned that this cathedral was built with the stone of the destroyed mayan temple that once stood in its place. The tapestry of tragedy and sorrow yet still the hunger for spiritual sanctity & relief is imbedded in the rotation of the human experience. On reflection in my own way I’ve also used objects of worship in aid of healing. During a time of quite intense loss in my early 20’s I had an obsession with building shrines in my New York apartment made from found objects, figurines and trinkets. I was probably quite desperate to feel relief from what I was going through so would search for these little shiny memento’s to escape. At some point when the bindings of grief began to fall away those objects that I had so preciously collected & arranged held a past energy that I wanted to let go & I threw them all away. Purging, shedding skins, embracing change is very important to me, dusting off the debris.