Bello e Brutto

Lake Como is a site of exquisite beauty with a dark patriarchal history. Following a series of graphite studies created whilst adopting Dürer’s philosophy, to draw nature precisely is to get closer to the truth of the matter, I became fascinated by the appearance of semi-recognisable human, animal and plant-like bodies.

A flowering head with Medussa-like tendrils, woven within themes of the Schignano carnival, the walnut tree root masks, ancient olive trees, and visceral tentacles reaching outwards. The coming of spring, a string of fleshy seed pods hang in a cluster, a community, the speculative imagining of life outside the binaries of gender. This diptych celebrates the poetics of relation and the complex and entangled nature of labels such as ‘the beautiful and the ugly’.