Tell us about your creative process. What drives your practice? 

Articulating and expressing myself through words has never come easily, but through visual expression I feel I can convey my lived experience eloquently. Communicating this self-expression is what ultimately drives my practice. 

My relationship to my body and how it is perceived by others has always felt like a large part of who I am. I have always lived in a larger body and this has been central to a lot of my experiences, how it is perceived by strangers, friends, family and lovers, and how these perceptions have often impacted my self-worth. 

My attempts in expressing this are central to my practice, but so are the many parts of myself that make up my identity, things that aren’t seen by others. What I ultimately strive to convey through self portraits of my nude, voluptuous figure is how an individual (in this case myself) contains multitudes, and how these aspects of self are often dichotomous - assertive and confident, yet simultaneously vulnerable and fragile. 

What draws you to screenprinting over other processes? 

Like many, I am drawn to the process-driven nature of printmaking, but what keeps me in the screenprinting studio is how deeply the medium supports my work conceptually. I have dabbled in other photographic print processes, such as photogravure, but to me, screenprinting offers a delicate balance between process and image. 

I am drawn to screenprinting and the halftone image for several reasons. The halftone interrupts the photographic image, and shifts how the image is read depending on proximity. From a distance the image is cohesive but up close, it dissolves. This process further supports ideas of concealment and revealment to discuss themes of identity. 

Equally important is the physicality of the process itself, and the way printing on a large scare requires my entire body. I need to squat to coat a screen, lift heavy frames, repeatedly bend and extend to print, using my weight to push ink through the mesh. I have to wait for each layer to dry before printing the next and by building the print layer by layer, the final work echoes my time, energy, ownership of my body but also the labour of love I have for screenprinting. 

Your work often employs paper and silk as both a material and metaphor. How do these delicate substrates contribute to your exploration of fragility and vulnerability? 

I often choose to print on papers that feel connected to the body. Instead of using heavy, bright white paper that sits apart from the image, I am drawn to thin, textured mulberry papers that echo the look and feel of skin. 

Lately, I have been exploring how paper behaves like skin in the way it folds, wrinkles, creases, and tears, and the ways we try to smooth it back again. Paper, like skin, is delicate and marked by time. I recently created a series of graphite drawings that used the same piece of paper as a reference, documenting how over time and with handling, the paper began to deteriorate. 

I have also started working with silk as another way to explore obscuring the body. In a recent installation, I placed a sheer silk curtain in front of a screenprint of my nude body, inviting viewers to pull the silk aside to gaze upon my figure. The veil simultaneously hides and reveals, causing the act of looking to feel intimate and a little charged. It adds an element of choice and voyeurism, while still protecting the body, connecting closely to the meeting of concealment and exposure used to explore vulnerability and fragility in my practice. 

Can you tell us more about the role of self representation and how you use this to challenge normativity? 

I see my work as both a raw statement of presence and an exploration of the internal and external forces that shape my identity. By representing my own body, I reclaim space where I can control the narrative, rather than be defined by the dominant gazes, stereotypes, and cultural scripts that have historically rendered bodies like mine invisible or undesirable. 

Living in a fat body has profoundly shaped my experiences and sense of self-worth. Through focusing on my own flesh, I push back against normative ideals of beauty and belonging, and create a space that validates my own body on its own terms. By asserting presence while also resisting the expectation to conform or apologise, self-representation becomes both an act of visibility and an act of refusal. 

My practice challenges normativity by complicating what it means to see and be seen. By veiling, obscuring, or layering my form, I refuse to offer a singular or simplified version of myself. Instead, I present a body that is multiple - confident and vulnerable, fragile and resilient - and invite viewers to reflect on the assumptions and value systems that shape their own ways of looking. 

Are there any printmakers | artists that influence you? 

It is so difficult to narrow this down! 

Kiki Smith has always had a big influence, particularly the way she works with the body (both internally and externally) and metaphor. I am always taken with the texture within her prints, and how the prints seem to extend beyond the surface of the paper. 

Tracey Emin’s use of confessional artmaking has deeply resonated with my practice, and I admire the emotional power of expressing deeply personal internal narratives. 

Jenny Saville’s large-scale, unapologetic, visceral representations of the body have deeply influenced my work. Saville’s works challenge notions of traditional ideals of the body and beauty through scale and assertion of presence. 

More broadly, I am drawn to the work of women portrait artists, such as Nan Goldin and Cindy Sherman, whose approaches to representation feel direct and unapologetic. Their portraits can be bold and assertive or quiet and tender, but always carry a strong sense of presence. I admire how they capture the nuances of femininity, culture and a sense of complexity and multiplicity. 

Finally, what exciting projects are you working on at the moment? 

I recently completed my first solo exhibition at Platform by Canberra Contemporary in Kamberri/Canberra. Since then I have taken some time to reflect and recharge, but I am excited to continue experimenting with silk paneling in new ways and to push that material exploration further. 

I have also been enjoying slowing down with drawing, and as an extension of this I am looking forward to finally getting into the lithography studio. Learning this process feels like a natural next step for me, and I am excited to discover how it might open new directions for my practice within the world of print! 

Looking further ahead, I would like to extend my work beyond self-representation. I am interested in developing projects that involve collaboration, where I can interview others and create works that respond to their own relationships with their bodies and identities. This feels like an important evolution of my practice, and I am excited to see where it leads.