Statement

Growing up, my dream was to become a saint.  Through art, I am able to achieve this, though the role’s purity has become distorted.  As a child I knelt in front of the corpses of the canonized who had been obscured by wax and decoration.  They filled me with a morbid fascination for suffering, martyrdom and decay.  Though macabre, I believed that to successfully reach my own spiritual and physical triumph, I would need to die young, violently and in agony, thus leaving my soul and body uncorrupted by nature.  Unfortunately, nature did affect me, and I fell from grace with the traditions and religious rituals that my Maltese culture had enforced upon me.  As I struggle to retain and remember the gruesome beauty of the world that once surrounded me, I draw and intuitively respond to the memories of a complex and romanticized history.

The drawings spread organically, as slowly rendered lines and forms emerge from a web of scribbles.  Objects materialize in tandem with their evocation and are imbued with dignity.  In the beautification of putrefaction and violence, I refer to art history and Catholic relics, revealing grotesque realities often hidden beneath humanity’s idealized facades.  Using a shrine of Renaissance compositions in harmony with Baroque theatrics, I combine iconographic symbols, both ancient and contemporary, in a search for everyday intercessions between the individual and the divine.  Entangling rich labyrinths of reliquaries with images of the body, I examine nostalgia while considering my own impending and inevitable decomposition.