Interiors Made Exterior
Landscapes of Longing and Belonging
Thank you. I mean that. The response to my new series, Interiors Made Exterior: Landscapes of Longing and Belonging, has left me blown away. Every conversation with you about this work has given me a deep sense of connection, and it's so personal for me that I'm grateful for each one.
My Artist's Statement
My paintings begin with a feeling before they become a place. I work in acrylic on paper, thinning my paints to near-translucency and building form through layer upon layer of color — a process that is less about making marks than about allowing light to accumulate. The resulting surfaces are quiet and luminous, hovering somewhere between the observed and the imagined. People often ask whether I work in gouache. I do not. What looks like opacity is actually depth: many thin skins of paint laid one over another until the image seems to glow from within.
For several years, my work has circled a particular kind of landscape: secluded, sheltering, reached only after a journey. These are places of arrival — a cottage at the end of a path, a clearing in a forest, a room with a lit window. I came to this subject through my own experience of postpartum depression, a period in which domesticity felt both urgent and elusive, in which the idea of a safe, quiet place held an almost unbearable power. Painting those spaces was a way of reaching toward something I needed. The landscapes I made were not documentary. They were aspirational. They were, in the deepest sense, shelters I built for myself.
My current series extends this inquiry into unexpected territory: the worlds of contemporary romantasy fiction. I am drawn to writers working in this genre who understand that the most powerful fantastical landscapes are not spectacles — they are biographies. The places that move me most in these books are the ones inseparable from a specific character's history: a house built by hand as an act of love, a hot spring discovered in solitude, a tree whose roots have grown around centuries of memory. These are not backdrops. They are interiors made exterior. They are what a person looks like when translated into stone, water, and weather.
My process for this series begins with research. I identify real locations whose light, geology, and atmosphere feel true to each fictional place — cliffs in Sussex, canyons in Iceland, laterite banks in Kerala — and stitch elements from these sites into photographic collages that serve as painting references. This method is deliberate: I want the fantastical to be grounded in the actual, to carry the weight and texture of somewhere you could genuinely find yourself. In each painting, I withhold the figure. There is no character visible in the landscape. You, the viewer, are the one who has arrived. The narrative is yours to inhabit.
What interests me about the best fantasy writing — and what I hope these paintings enact — is the argument that the fantastical and the real are not opposites. They are lenses. The genre, at its most rigorous, uses invented worlds to illuminate truths about our own: about longing, about belonging, about the places that shape us and the places we carry inside us long after we have left. These paintings are small in scale. They do not traffic in the epic or the grandiose. They are intimate, specific, and — I hope — quietly strange. Like the books that inspired them, they ask what it might mean to find yourself somewhere you have never been and feel, unmistakably, that you have come home.
Featured in Art and Woman Edition 4
More exciting news: I'm one of 100 international artists included in the upcoming Art and Woman Edition 4 book. I was interviewed about my process, the meaning behind my work, how parenthood has affected my practice, and more.
The publication date is still to be determined. I'll let you know when it comes out and where you can purchase a copy, so keep an eye on your inbox.