People

This body of work explores the ways in which identities are shaped through relationships and acts of affiliation. People move through the world not only as individuals, but also as someone’s daughter, friend, neighbour, partner, relative, or acquaintance. These relationships create systems of belonging through which individuals become connected to one another and acquire additional layers of social identity.

Originating in photographs drawn from family albums and later expanding to images encountered through social media, this series considers the processes through which individuals become identified through their relation to others and the ways in which those relations shape how they are perceived and understood.

The act of painting becomes a process of translation in which the source image is transformed through gesture, colour, materiality, and subjective experience. Through painting, the image is no longer approached as a record of a particular person but as a site in which the complexities of relation, belonging, and identification can be explored.

The titles complete this process. Rather than identifying the subjects by name, they locate them within a chain of relationships, referring to them through their connection to others. A subject may appear as the granddaughter of a doctor, the cousin of a neighbour, or the friend of a relative. In this way, the titles echo the logic of the paintings themselves, reflecting the processes through which identities are formed, recognised, and understood through relation to others.