BODIES

When people first hear the word sex in relation to art, they expect titillation. They expect provocation, or at the very least, some kind of confrontation with desire. But that has never been my interest. The body itself does not carry sexuality. A nude form is not inherently erotic. It is only the viewer’s mind, layered with conditioning, cultural baggage, and projection, that makes it so. What we call “sexual” is not truth; it is perspective.

I have always wanted to strip that away. To look at the human body as material, as shape, as structure. To see it as clay, moulded by time and choice, scarred by experience, transformed by living. In this sense, my practice in working with nudes has always been an attempt at reorientation. I am not asking you to see a body. I am asking you to unlearn what you think a body means.

In the series Bodies, I created abstracted portraits of the nude without adornment, without manipulation, without the usual trappings of desire. I worked with individuals to simply capture their forms, poses and perspectives as sculptural, as neutral, as direct. My goal was to silence the cultural noise that insists a bare body must be sexual, and instead present it as the vessel it truly is: the structure that carries us through life. A form, no more or less remarkable than a rock face or a cloud bank, and yet infinitely complex because it belongs to a human being.

I often think about how no one looks at a lion or a bird or a tree and sees it as indecent in its nakedness. We don’t hide our dogs behind curtains, or dress flowers to cover them from shame. Nature simply exists, unapologetic, unclothed, unadorned. But the human animal has made itself an exception. We’ve built entire systems of morality, commerce, and repression around what is, at its core, simply a body. And in doing so, we have forgotten how to see.

That forgetting is what I try to confront in works like Floral Figures, where the human form and the flower intertwine. A body is not unlike a vase: a container, a surface, a temporary architecture. Just as a flower blooms, peaks, and fades, so too does flesh. Both are fragile, both are trophies and symbols, both are broken, longed after, displayed, and eventually returned to the earth. In this way, nudity is not about desire at all, it is about transience, about beauty as a temporary state, about the dignity of simply existing.

So when I speak of sex in my work, what I really mean is its undoing. I am not interested in eroticism. I am interested in clarity. In stripping away the projections that we’ve been taught to paste onto skin. What remains is not pornography, not provocation, but presence. The body as body. The form as form. A chance, however brief, to see without wanting. To look without consuming. To return the human form to its rightful place as nature, not spectacle.

Limited edition prints available upon request.