“This painting started life as an idea at the end of 2025 after a summer I spent teaching in Oxford. It was a beautiful experience being there, I was surrounded by so much art, history, and culture, and I got to see things I’d admired from a distance for a long time.
But, as is often the case, I also felt like an outsider, to the institutions, to the city, to the stories themselves. Even though I felt deeply, emotionally connected to them, there was still this sense of distance, of not quite belonging. That experience mirrors how I move through the world as someone who is queer, and as someone who is neurodivergent.
There’s often this underlying urge in me; a need to howl, to scream, to crash into things, to break something open. This painting is a way of giving that feeling a form. It’s an attempt to express that tension and intensity, the push and pull between admiration and alienation.
The work is informed by the medieval art I encountered in Oxford, particularly the strange creatures that live in the margins of illuminated manuscripts. I often find myself identifying with those marginal figures, the monsters, the odd beasts, the things that aren’t central to the story but still exist alongside it, watching, reacting, surviving.”