Artist Statement

Artist/Curator - Creative Director - Small Luxury Goods and Textile Specialist

Since receiving a positive diagnosis in June 2013, I have been focusing on defining my HIV and Queer identity by investigating the 1930’s Fruitcake Factory phenomena and one of its main psychosurgery procedure: the ice pick lobotomy.

My own experience of the body channels already existing concepts through my practice, presenting potential conversation between Didier Anzieu’s “The Skin-Ego” and Julia Kristeva’s “Powers of Horror”. Understanding the skin being a marker of the body’s boundaries that can become a perforable surface, I introduce spaces that operate as potential “traps” that compromise how we feel “safe” and trigger an underlying anxiety towards remedies, cures and surgical interventions. Using the commonplace of the skin, my smell experimentations and abstract informal installations of life-size ice pick sculptures set the viewer up: suggesting its skin is capable of being penetrated by sharp-edged tools or encounter the Invisible? There, the roles of the aggressor and the victim become reversible, generating possible shifting narratives of power, desire, pain, discomfort or hope.

From this division between the real and intangible, body and soul, it is understood the skin is a protective or fabricated imaginary layer that continuously evolves despite its degenerative process. Expanding HIV as a status, these spaces attempt subverting the hierarchy of our senses and bring awareness on how the Invisible is corrupting fate.

Throughout my time in the Masters in Fibers and Material Practices program at Concordia University in Montreal, I was able to explore my practice through sculptural / miasma installations and realize a multitude of curatorial productions from initial idea/inception through to coordination and execution of exhibitions.

I have also worked long-term in both the luxury wholesale and retail markets, designing interiors, supplying fabrics and wallpapers for commercial and residential projects, private jets and yachts for elite clients and also was trained at Dior, TOD’S and Loewe as a prêt-à-porter and small luxury goods specialist. In the course of these past experiences, I have perfected my existing textile and material knowledge, developed inventive merchandising skills and have acquired a deep understanding of my own artistic sensibility through professional endeavours.

The broad spectrum of my past academic and professional experience showcases my knowledge and understanding of aesthetics through fashion, materials and techniques.