2021

Moving incisively beyond the dimension of an exhibition, BIRDAY SWAMP is a heavily sensorial and profoundly immersive experience – visceral in its materiality, haunting in its conceptual narrative, and conflictingly beautiful in its outcome. 

The presence of the female figure and experience, in all of its historical, social, cultural and political complexity, is deliberate, poignant and at times overwhelmingly real. Through an aesthetic that itself reveals a duality, oscillating between the suggestiveness of deformity and a harmonious intersection of materials and compositions, the artist delves into themes of abuse, trauma, fragility and suffering, while simultaneously emerging triumphant, inspired, resilient, resolute and unwaveringly powerful: reborn.

Beyond the centrality of the feminine, lies a fascination with life itself, an existential angst. A strongly mythological approach questions not only the origin of life, but the antecedence of life, and the afterlife. Yet here mortality is not completely called upon. Rather, the artist chooses to understand the concepts of before, after and everything in between as the result of experience, and, more importantly, reaction to experience. Birday Swamp is both birthed by the artist and represents the artist’s rebirth. Death, as an act of creation.