ARTIST STATEMENT

A large fraction of my feminist practice revolves around equality in sex. For that purpose, pornography and erotica play an integral role in how people begin to learn and identify with their sexualities. In this regard, I create traditional but highly satirical oil paint compositions on panel that depict erotic images of women drawn from legal pornography I have produced. Each element of the scenery, costume design, and visual narrative is based on lived experiences the model has shared with me following a conducted interview.

This current body of work continues to center on perspective, but now expands to explore themes of sexuality and kink through a distinctly femme lens. One that includes both the subject’s lived experience and my own as a pansexual woman. My practice engages with how gender fluidity, queerness, and femme sexualities are often erased or misrepresented within Western media and erotic culture. Much of contemporary pornography and erotica still reflects a false narrative imposed upon women by the male gaze; flattening sexual identity into a limited set of tropes designed to satisfy patriarchal expectations. What distinguishes my work is its grounding in the female gaze: a reorientation of eroticism toward the lived realities, fantasies, and sexual agency of women and femmes across a spectrum of identities.

The resulting compositions are laced with irony to highlight the absurd and outdated beliefs Western culture continues to hold about women’s sexuality. I create my own pornography, embracing its eroticism and humor as tools for critique. When reframed through the female gaze, these elements shift from objectification to empowerment. Though pornography has historically catered to the male gaze, it has evolved in some spaces to reflect femme and queer perspectives; offering women a way to define and explore their own sexualities. Through this lens, my work grants the women I portray agency over their bodies while cultivating a space where shared experience, vulnerability, and humor challenge long-standing cultural stigmas.

In a broader context, my work contributes to the ongoing dialogue around feminist figuration. While figuration, the female nude, and the human body are deeply rooted in painting’s historical canon, my practice challenges how sexuality and identity are traditionally represented. Sexuality doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it’s shaped by culture, personal history, and embodied experience, especially when filtered through the lens of gendered power dynamics. By centering femme perspectives, I aim to push this lineage forward, creating space for more honest, inclusive, and nuanced representations of desire.