Artist Statement
My work emerges from a fascination with impermanence, queer identity, and the beauty of paradox.
Through sculptural environments, installations, and scenography, I create temporary ecosystems that seem to grow through a space. My works attach themselves to the construction of a room and begin to change once people move through them and the atmosphere around them comes alive. Familiar locations become microcosms where opposite feelings can exist at the same time. Something can feel safe and unsettling, artificial and sincere, vulnerable and powerful.
My queer identity fundamentally shapes how I perceive and engage with the world. Not necessarily as a subject, but as a way of looking at the world. Being queer keeps shifting the way I understand the categories we use to define ourselves and each other. the categories can create recognition and belonging, but they can also become limits. The fear of not belonging often makes people push themself into fixed definitions, while reality is usually far more fluid, contradictory, and unstable.
I am interested in what exists beyond the need to define everything clearly. The desire to stay in control can keep us from growing, or even from realising that there may be other ways of being, feeling, and understanding. For me, queerness opens up a space where not knowing does not have to be frightening. It can also be a place where beauty begins, especially when something refuses to become one clear answer.
I am drawn to images that are often dismissed as too much, too artificial, too naive, or too fake. I am interested in the place where camp and sincerity touch each other. These qualities bring self-awareness into the work and allow seriousness and absurdity to exist together.
A balloon is never a neutral object. It immediately brings up associations with celebration and with a childlike temporary joy that can be easily reproduced. When we think of a balloon, most of us probably imagine the same object. Its shape feels decided, just as the feeling attached to it feels decided. I like to play with those expectations.
In my work, the balloon is deconstructed through a technique that gives the material some control over its own shape, almost as if it is growing organically. It is not only the shape that becomes distorted, but also our expectation of what this object is supposed to be. The result is something we might associate with nature, while still being glossy, artificial, and clearly made from a reproduced party object.
This creates an absurd tension. To make something vulnerable and almost alive out of such a familiar material feels strangely sincere to me. It reflects our constant desire to control the world around us and shape it into whatever is most convenient. In the end, that control is an illusion. Nothing can avoid its own impermanence. The moment a work reaches its full bloom, it also begins to disappear. The material changes, deflates, and eventually becomes only a memory of what was there.
In that fragility I recognise something deeply connected to queer existence. A balloon sculpture can take over a space with confidence, while still consisting of nothing more than stored air. It is present and vulnerable at the same time. For me, this reflects the freedom many queer people have fought for and the painful awareness that this freedom is never as stable as it may seem.
Much of my work is created in spaces used for nightlife, performance, theatre, and queer events. The installation comes alive when people enter it, move through it, and connect it to their own experience. I try to build worlds that feel fully alive, if only for a brief moment, before the moment disappears again.