Even as a child, I sensed something wasn’t right. My art practice is an ongoing interrogation into what and why – an attempt to make sense of what still feels senseless. I dig into the margins of history, culture, geopolitics, and personal memory, hunting for meaning. That childhood instinct, I now recognise, was early warning of the meta-crisis of late-stage capitalism.
Speculative history paintings and fictions – past, present and future what-ifs – are built from dissonance and anger, made with love and a fierce need for beauty: a non-violent refusal of conflict, control, and a life colonised by commodity. As authoritarianism rises and fascistic thinking returns, this urgency drives every story I tell.
Storytelling gives my critique a beating heart. My commitment to human rights runs through every character I create. I see the world through their eyes, speak in their voices – and where empathy demands discomfort, I don’t flinch from it.
History – our story – is my chosen medium: distant yet familiar terrain for grounding critique. Rather than simply painting it, I contemporise the genre through participatory forms, opening space for speculative thought and symbolic acts of resistance. This is what I call picture-events: interactive, immersive works fusing analogue process with digital and broadcast technology.
Like the history painters before me, I work across multiple techniques and processes. Research distils through writing, collage, drawing, storyboarding, sampling, choreography, feedback – grounded in kindness and inclusivity. I handcraft objects, costumes, props, sculpture, and text through slow, deliberate labour, then bring them to life through photography, green screen, digital film, live and mediated performance, sound – and, at times, silence.
From the solitude of the studio to the choreography of live performance, I’ve built room-sized comic strips you can walk through; drawn worlds in pencil and ink on paper and gesso; painted in oil on laser-cut powder-coated steel; animated works with Arduino circuits and proximity sensors; developed 3D characters and environments; collaborated with AI; published graphic novels and artist books.
Every project stays open. The themes and characters keep pulling me back, demanding further attention. Currently, I’m painting my world in response to the ever-stranger one forming around us, writing Mercury – the sixth story in my Elemental series – and performing collaboratively with artist Sasha Bowles. Each provocation lands in a bold palette, visually and conceptually, threaded through with radical vulnerability, wry humour, and complexity.
Essay by art writer and critic Anna McNay – The end is where we start from.