About

Rooted in quiet observation and driven by a lifelong affinity with animals, my work explores the complex and often contradictory ways we relate to the natural world—particularly through systems of display, taxonomy, and preservation. Trained as a painter and shaped by years of living between cultures—across the US and Europe—I’ve become increasingly focused on the entanglement of empathy, extinction, and aesthetics within Natural History collections.
Animals, in my work, are not decorative or symbolic—they exist in the paradoxical ambiguity of scientific object versus subjects, individuals. Whether displayed on shelves, submerged in jars, or fading into the background of crowded museum storerooms, they are rendered with intimacy and care. My aim is to slow down perception, to draw the viewer into a quiet space where looking becomes an act of attention, and attention becomes a form of respect. Each bird, chameleon, monkey, or insect is treated like a portrait, with the same dignity we might reserve for human subjects.
The imagery I work with emerges from deep, sustained engagement: months of drawing at museums, conversations with curators, and ongoing research into animal studies, natural history, and collecting practices. Visits to collections around the world—from Florence and Vienna to New York, Oxford and Washington D.C.—have informed not only the content of my work, but its ethics. Behind-the-scenes access to storerooms has revealed vast inventories of preserved animals, their beauty and fragility held in tension with their containment. These encounters are often unsettling: they speak of reverence and violence, care and control, memory and loss.
A formative experience occurred during a research visit to the Natural History Museum in Berlin, where I encountered thousands of taxidermied birds stored in old wooden cabinets. The sheer number of specimens was overwhelming, yet each seemed to possess its own quiet presence. That moment solidified my commitment to creating work that acknowledges the weight of species loss—not abstractly, but viscerally.
In one recent series, animals gradually disappear from one painting to the next, a slow vanishing meant to echo the invisibility of extinction statistics.
Formally, my paintings and drawings are dense, detailed, and compositionally restrained. I often work on a single piece for months, layers of gestures, control, empathy and distance. I am particularly conscious of how formal choices—scale, mark-making, space—carry ethical implications when the subject is a non-human animal. The work resists spectacle; it asks for presence.
In a time when biodiversity loss is often reduced to numbers and headlines, I see painting as a space of resistance—a place where we can reimagine our relationships with other species, even if only momentarily. Through careful looking, I invite viewers to confront the silences, the absences, and the quiet agency that lingers in these preserved bodies. I hope the animals in my work are not only seen, but seen as looking back.